How to recover deleted photos from a camera memory card

Why cards are the easiest case in file recovery

Three things are true of a memory card that are not true of your computer's own drive, and together they make cards the situation where recovery works best.

• No background erase. Windows sends the TRIM command to internal SSDs, and the drive wipes freed blocks within minutes. Cards and USB sticks in normal use do not get it, so deleted photos stay readable until something writes over them — a week later or a year later.
• Nothing writes to a card unless you do. There is no operating system on it, no indexing service, no temporary files. Out of the camera, it is frozen exactly as it was.
• Cameras write in one long line. A card fills front to back with whole photos, so most files sit in one continuous stretch — which means even when the file table is gone, the photos can be found by their contents alone and come back whole.

What to do, step by step

1. Stop shooting and take the card out. Every new frame can land on the deleted ones. If the camera is still on the card, the recovery has already started going worse.
2. Flip the lock switch on a full-size SD card. The small slider on the edge makes the card read-only in hardware, so nothing on any computer can write to it while you work. On microSD, use an adapter that has one, or simply be careful.
3. Connect the card with a card reader, not the camera. A card reader presents the card as an ordinary drive letter, which is what recovery software needs to read it sector by sector. Many cameras connect as a media device instead, which exposes photos the camera admits to having — precisely the ones that are not the problem.
4. Say no to every offer to fix or format it. Windows may offer to scan and fix the card; the camera may offer to format it. Both write to the card. Neither is a step towards getting photos back.
5. Scan the card read-only. Install the recovery software on your computer, not on the card, and point it at the card's drive letter. A scan that only reads cannot make things worse, and a 32 GB card takes a few minutes.
6. Recover to your computer's drive, then check the photos. Never save recovered files back to the card — they would land on the clusters still holding the rest of your pictures. Open the important ones before you shoot with that card again.

Raw files, JPEGs and video come back differently

Cards are formatted FAT32 or exFAT, and the deleted directory entry usually still holds the file's name, its size and the first of its clusters. So photos often come back under their own names — IMG_2214.CR2 rather than file0038.cr2 — sometimes with the first character of the name missing, because that is the byte FAT overwrites with its delete marker. An honest tool shows a placeholder there rather than inventing the letter.

When the directory is gone — after a format, or on a damaged card — files are found by their contents instead. Unlost recognises 64 file types this way, including the raw formats cameras actually produce: CR2 and CR3 from Canon, NEF from Nikon, ARW from Sony, RAF from Fujifilm, ORF from Olympus, and DNG. Those come back numbered and sorted by type, with no folder structure, because the names lived in the index the format replaced.

Video is the hard case on a full card. A long clip is large enough that the camera may have had to split it across separate stretches of the card, and a file found by its contents can only be followed while it is continuous. Clips recovered from a card with no file table often play for a while and then stop.

Check the photos before you reuse the card

A recovered photo can be exactly the right size and still be partly somebody else's bytes. Unlost checks each file after writing it and gives one of three answers. For JPEG it can tell whether the structure closes properly, which catches most damage. For camera raw formats — which are the most valuable files it ever touches — it usually reports unchecked, because the format offers no checksum and no way to be certain. That is not evasion: reporting a raw file as intact merely because nothing disagreed would be the most expensive thing a recovery tool could get wrong.

So open the pictures. Look at a dozen of them at full size, especially the ones you care about most, before that card goes back in the camera.

When the card itself is the problem

Not every card failure is a deleted-file problem, and software cannot fix the ones that aren't.

• The card asks to be formatted, or shows as RAW in Windows. That is usually a damaged file system on a card full of perfectly good photos. Do not format it — see the drive asks to be formatted, or shows up as RAW.
• The card is not detected at all, in any reader. A dead controller or a physically broken card is not a software problem. A recovery lab is the only remaining option, and it is expensive.
• The card is a counterfeit. Cards sold as 512 GB that are really 32 GB report a size they do not have, and photos written past the real capacity were never stored anywhere. Nothing can recover data that was never written.
• The card is failing intermittently — reads stall, the reader disconnects. Take a single sequential copy of it first and search the copy, rather than making a dying controller survive an hour of seeking. Copy a failing drive before you scan it explains why one pass is gentler than a scan.

Questions about card recovery

I formatted the card in the camera. Are the photos gone?

Usually not. A camera performs the equivalent of a quick format: it writes a fresh, empty file table and leaves the picture data untouched. The names are gone, but the photos themselves are generally recoverable in full as long as you have not shot anything since.

Can I recover the photos onto the same card?

No. Writing to the card is exactly what destroys the photos still waiting to be read from it. Recover to your computer's drive or another card, and leave the source card untouched until you have checked the results. Unlost refuses to accept the source drive as a destination for this reason.

Does it matter which card reader I use?

Any reader that gives the card a drive letter will do. What matters more is that it is a reader rather than the camera's USB cable, since a camera connected as a media device only shows the files it still has an index entry for.

The card shows 0 bytes free, or the wrong size. Is that recoverable?

Often, yes. A wrong size in Windows usually means the boot sector or the file table is damaged rather than the photos. Scanning the card sector by sector ignores what the card claims about itself and reads what is actually there.

My photos were on a phone. Is it the same?

Only if the phone's storage appears as a drive letter, which is true for a microSD card taken out of the phone and put in a reader. A phone's internal storage connects as a media device and is encrypted on any modern handset, so it cannot be read this way.