My phone is lost or broken — can I get my photos back?

First: if the phone is broken but you still have it

A phone with a smashed screen or a dead battery usually still has all its data. Do not let anyone wipe, factory-reset or "refurbish" it — never uninstall or reinstall the app or clear its data on any device; the photos live on the device. A repair shop can often get a broken phone alive long enough to run a full transfer to a new phone, which carries the complete evidence store (see the new-iPhone / new-Android guides). Treat a broken-but-present phone as a rescue job, not a loss.

The honest recovery surface for a genuinely lost phone

Work through these in order. What you recover depends on what was switched on before the loss.

1. Reports already sent — safe

Everything you sent before losing the phone is off the device and safe:

• The report PDF was stored with us at send time, and your assessor can open it from the link in the email you sent. Emails sent from versions before 2.1 had the PDF attached, so your email account's Sent folder holds a copy of those.
• The photo archive for each sent report was uploaded to secure storage, and your assessor can reach both through their free portal — every current report sent to their address appears there (one you have since handed to another assessor or deleted does not).

If your worry is "has my assessor still got what I sent" — yes.

2. Gallery copies — safe if photo backup was on

Since version 2.0, every photo captured with Buildsnapper is also written to the phone's photo gallery at full resolution, with its location and time in the file (as long as the app was allowed to add to the gallery). Gallery copies of photos taken before 2.0 may have no location, and the gallery import refuses a photo without one. So:

• iPhone: if iCloud Photos was on, those copies are in your Photos library — visible at icloud.com/photos and on any device signed into your Apple ID.
• Android: if Google Photos backup was on, they are in your Google Photos account — photos.google.com.

These gallery copies are proper evidence: full resolution, location-tagged. On a replacement phone, ask us before re-importing by hand: we can switch on photo recovery for your account, which puts each gallery copy back against the photo record it belongs to. The evidence survives.

3. A phone backup — sometimes everything

If the lost phone had a recent full backup (iCloud backup or a computer backup on iOS; note that on Android the cloud backup does not include the app's photo store), restoring a new phone from that backup brings the app's photos back exactly as they were at backup time.

4. What is genuinely gone

Photos that were never sent in a report, with no gallery backup and no device backup, existed only on the lost phone. We will not pretend otherwise — those need retaking, and if the detail is closed up, that is a conversation to have with your assessor early rather than late.

What to do right now

1. Do not rush to set up a new phone — the order matters (see the migration guides).
2. Check icloud.com/photos or photos.google.com from any computer to see whether your gallery copies survived.
3. Contact support — choosing "Evidence at risk on site" on the form if a report deadline is near. Tell us which phone you lost, whether photo backup was on, and which plots are affected — we will help you map exactly what is recoverable before you retake anything.