I uninstalled and reinstalled the app — can my photos come back?

First, so the situation is clear: uninstalling removes the app's private storage, which is where the working photo files live. That is the phone's behaviour, not a choice we get to make. Reinstalling and signing in brings your account, projects and plot records back from the cloud — which is why everything looks present — but the photo files those records point to were removed with the old install. This is exactly why our advice everywhere else is to never uninstall or reinstall the app (why we say never uninstall).

What matters now is that the photos usually survive in other places. Do not capture over the affected sections, do not delete anything from your phone's gallery, and do not uninstall again — then check the following.

Where copies usually survive

• Your phone's photo gallery. Every photo taken with version 2.0 or later also wrote a full-resolution, location-tagged copy to the gallery. Open your gallery around the capture dates — if the photos are there, your evidence exists and can be brought back.
• Everything you have sent. Sent report PDFs and photo archives are stored with us and your assessor keeps access. Anything already sent is entirely safe (what is backed up).
• A phone backup made before the uninstall. On iPhone, iCloud and computer backups include the app's storage; a backup taken before the uninstall contains the working files. Do not attempt a full-phone restore on your own if you have captured anything new since — talk to us first.

Getting them back

1. Contact us through the support page — choosing "Evidence at risk on site" if a deadline or closing-up is involved. Tell us: iPhone or Android, roughly when you uninstalled, and which projects and plots are affected.
2. On iPhone and Android, we can switch on an in-app recovery tool for your account: a Recover Missing Photos button on each plot with photos missing. It reads the gallery copies (with your permission) and matches each one back into its section by the second it was taken, with the location from its record. It works section by section; on Android, without photo access, you choose the photos yourself.
3. Re-importing gallery copies yourself also works for photos taken with version 2.0 or later — the steps are in importing photos from your gallery. A copy without a location can't be imported, so leave older photos to the recovery tool.

One caution while you wait: a plot can look empty on a second phone for a different reason entirely — photos only ever exist on the device that captured them (one device, by design). If the "missing" photos were taken on a different phone, they are still on that phone, and nothing here applies.

We treat reinstall cases with urgency because the gallery copies are the last line of defence. The sooner nothing else changes on the phone, the better the recovery.