Here’s a neat new feature that Samsung has introduced to its Gallery app with Android Pie. You can now trash your images instead of deleting them permanently. It’s like the recycle bin on Windows or the trash section in an email service or photo storage services like Google Photos. The trash is emptied every 15 days, giving you two weeks time to decide whether some photos are worth keeping on your device or not.

Trashed gallery items can be restored from the Trash section, which is accessed by tapping the three-dot button in the Pictures tab of the Gallery app. It’s not accessible from any of the other tabs of the gallery (Albums, Stories, and Shared), but that is hopefully just the case for now and will be fixed with the official Android Pie release.

How do I enable the trash in Gallery app?

The gallery will suggest you to turn the trash option on the first time you try to delete a picture. You can also enable it by going into the Gallery app’s settings. In addition to being emptied every 15 days, all items in the trash are also deleted if you turn it off from the gallery settings. So make sure you recover any important files that you may have deleted before you decide to disable the feature. Furthermore, if you use a microSD card for storing your photos, images, and videos, you will need to empty the trash manually before the card is removed so that no one can access them on another device.

Android Pie and One UI will bring many more features to the Galaxy S9 and other Samsung devices, and we will keep bringing them to your attention as and when we discover them. Just make sure to bookmark our One UI (Android Pie) feature focus page to stay up-to-date on all those features.

Update: As pointed out by one of our readers, the trash feature was already available on Android Oreo for images synced to Samsung Cloud. However, Samsung Cloud’s trashed images weren’t saved on the device, making it a poor solution because of the extremely limited free Samsung Cloud storage.