Need help unlocking my s4

[Jeff Martin]

I have an old Galaxy S4 that was my wife's previous phone. Well, one of my daughters stole it from her nightstand and had it for a while. We finally got it back but now it has a screen lock (pin) on it and we do not know what the pin is. She turned 18 and left our house shortly after taking the phone so we have no contact with her to ask her what the pin is.
Is there a way to unlock the phone?
My wife has a couple of years of pictures on it that we would like to attempt to recover. I believe she may have deleted them as well but I know there are ways to recover deleted photos so I was going to try to recover them once I get into the phone.

I also know that she should have been setup with google pics so the pics would have been saved as she took them and she is set up now on her current phone.

Thanks!

Jeff

 

[lunatic59]

Jeff, you may be out of luck on several levels.

First, if it's locked with a pin, then entering the pin incorrectly may give the option to unlock it with a password. That would be the password for the Google account the phone was registered to. I'm going to guess that if you don't have the pin, you probably don't have the password either. Also be advised that on some phone models, incorrectly entering a pin or password too many times might trigger a factory reset which will wipe all the user data ... including photos.

I know there are ways to recover deleted photos so I was going to try to recover them once I get into the phone.

If you are thinking about apps like 'recuva', i wouldn't count on it. First, there is no "trash can" or "recycle bin" in Android. Deleted files are truly deleted. And, since the S4 shipped with Android 4.2, you've got dynamically allocated partitions (That started with Android 4.1) meaning that the file tables get rewritten all the time and they're not going to be accessible by an external utility.