[Android Central Question]

I lost my pics after doing a factory reset on my pixel 2 xl.ibwas trying to find missing fingerscan software but it didn't worj I had even went into my settings and marked them all to be backed up. My camera shows the old phootos i took but none of my albums recovered. Any suggestions?

[SpookDroid]

Unless the album was backed up to Photos (or other cloud service), not much you can do unfortunately. You can try to run 3rd party 'recovery' apps from the Play Store but wouldn't get my hopes up, especially if you encrypted the device before the factory reset.

You can check online (photos.google.com) to see which albums and pictures were already backed up, but anything not there was never uploaded.

[Rukbat]

"Albums" are folders in the phone. The picture files are backed up, but you can't back up folders - they're an artifact that only exists in the phone.

Use a file manager. Go to DCIM/Camera, then create each of your "albums" as folders. Then find each picture that belongs in the first "album" and mark it, Copy. Go to that folder and paste. (Don't Move - if a move blows up in the middle, you lose both the original and the copy.) If the copy works, delete the originals. Then go on to the next folder, and so on.

Then restart the phone, so that Media Scan learns where the pictures are. (Apps like Gallery and Google Photos don't search the phone for pictures, they look in the Media Scan database. It's much faster that way.)