How can I recover pictures inadvertently deleted from an Android phone?

They are uploaded to Google+ as soon as you take them (or as soon as you connect to wifi, depending on your setting). A loss of (or broken phone) shouldn’t mean a single missing piece of data.

Were they saved to internal memory or an SD card?

They were saved to a memory card. I checked Google+ (that was a great answer by the way. I didn’t realise that) but there is nothing after March 2014 which is what I am mostly interested in.

If you have an SD card reader in your computer, put the card in. Next, download Recuva and install it to your computer. DO NOT save anything else to the SD card. Use Recuva to do a scan and it should find your photos and restore them, as long as they were not overwritten.

@flip86 Thanks. I’ll try that too.

@flip86 Damn you for stealing my answer :P

Good thing you saved them to an SD card, internal memory is pretty much unrecoverable on android devices for some reason.

And re-enable your auto backup. It is unlimited storage.

I would double-check Google+ on the Web, too, because there should be a tooltip in the top right (blue rectangle with a clock and the month) that’ll take you to a certain month.

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately recuva doesn’t seem to recognise android devices.

@flutherother You need to take the SD card out and plug it in directly.

OK I will try that.

Stop using your Android device. Any new data written into your phone might overwrite the lost data and make them unrecoverable. Then you can check whether you have a backup file. if yes, you can directly recover your pictures from it. If no, you may need a third-party software. There are many Android data recovery software in the market.