Recovering deleted files from unrooted Galaxy Nexus In my infinite buffoonery earlier today I deleted the entire camera pictures folder from my GSM Galaxy Nexus. I had last copied images from my phone in August and have lost all pictures since then :( 

I've been looking around quite a bit to see if there's any way possible to recover those files.  The two options that I've come across so far - using an Undelete app available in the Play store or using dd to take a block-level dump, both require the phone to be rooted. However my GNex is not and the official rooting process requires unlocking the bootloader which wipes the device. There was a thread on xda-developers that documented an exploit that could be used to root the GNex without unlocking the bootloader, however that exploit has been patched by Google.

Do any of you have any bright ideas on what I can do?

What's the nature of device wipe like that happens while rooting? Is recovery still possible after that making rooting still an option?
Sorry, but in you phone there not SD card, and internal flash blocks can be rewritten, when phone works (physical location of blocks are different from logical and phone record logs, change internal data, download updates).

It's available chance with destructive methods (read flash on programmer device), and much smaller with root you phone (read whole memory), because any change of phone state decrease chances.