What happens when I delete a photo, a plot or a project?

Deleting one photo

Tap the photo in its section, then Delete Photo, then confirm.

What happens, in order: the photo is removed from the plot's online record first, and only once that succeeds does the app delete its stored copy of the image. (With no signal, the photo leaves the plot straight away and the app says "Photo deleted — will sync when you're back online"; it keeps its own copy of the file for now. Only if the removal is refused outright is nothing deleted, and the photo stays put.)

What survives, for photos taken with version 2.0 or later: the full-resolution, location-tagged copy in your phone's gallery. The app never touches your gallery when deleting. So an accidentally deleted photo is recoverable by re-importing that gallery copy into the section (see the gallery import article) — with its original location and date intact. A gallery copy of a photo taken before 2.0 may have no location, and the import refuses a photo without one.

What does not survive: the app's own copy is gone immediately. If the gallery copy has also been deleted, the photo is unrecoverable — which is one reason never to bulk-clear your gallery of site photos.

Deleting a plot

From the project's edit screen, deleting a plot asks you to confirm that the plot and all of its photos and reports go with it. Two safety nets sit behind that confirmation:

• The plot's online record is kept for 30 days. Its photo records, with each photo's location and time, are held back rather than removed, and its reports are withdrawn rather than deleted. Support can restore all of it within 30 days of deletion. After that it goes for good.
• The photo files on your device are not deleted immediately. The app holds them for the same 30-day window, precisely so a support recovery brings back a working plot with its evidence, not an empty shell. If the deletion is recovered, the pending file deletion is cancelled automatically; if not, the files are cleared after the window ends.

Reports already sent to your assessor for that plot are withdrawn straight away, and go back to them if the plot is restored. The copy of the report on your phone is not kept, because it can be made again: send the plot again to see it in your Reports list.

The plot's record is kept by the latest version of the app, so keep it updated. A plot deleted on an older version has its reports and photo files held for the 30 days, but not its record: it would need setting up again, with its photos imported from your gallery.

Deleting a project

Same shape, larger scope: the project, all its plots, their reports and records are soft-deleted with the 30-day window, and the photo files on the device are kept for those 30 days. Locally saved report PDFs are removed straight away — they are regenerable, so nothing irreplaceable goes.

Deleted something by accident?

1. Stop. Do not try to rebuild the plot by hand yet, and above all follow the golden rule — do not uninstall the app or clear its data, which would destroy the held photo files the recovery depends on.
2. Ask us through the support page with the project and plot names and when you deleted them. Within 30 days we can restore the records, and the app's held files mean your photos come back with them.
3. After a recovery, open the plot and verify the photos display before carrying on.

The deletions with no recovery window

For clarity, these are immediate and permanent: Clear App Data in Settings (deletes all local photos, reports and appendix PDFs after two warnings) and deleting the app itself. Neither is ever the answer to a problem — see the golden rule article.