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How To Recover Deleted Photos From SD Card?

SD Card photo recovery

For your electronic device’s internal storage, SD cards are often used as an extension.
In order to take and store numerous digital photos and videos these small external memory cards greatly expand our capacity.

SD cards allow you to create extensive libraries of photographs to be viewed at your convenience. With these cards, users enjoy ample space in their devices to store lots of lovely memories that they don’t want to forget.

Why Would I Need to Recover Deleted Photos From an SD Card?
There is the possibility with all digital storage media, that at some time in your use of a digital camera, phone, or other camera-equipped devices you will need to recover photos from an SD card:

  1. You might need to recover photos from an SD card due to accidentally deleted photos or a simple mistaken click.
  2. Your SD card may have been corrupted or formatted inadvertently, making it impossible to access your photos. This situation can be quite stressful if these photos are important to you.

5 ‘SIMPLE WAYS’ to Recover Deleted Photos From an SD Card

Method No.1: Recovering from Your Device’s Internal Memory or Storage
The first place to find photos that you have deleted from an SD card is in your device’s internal memory or temporary storage on Mac or Windows PC. When you delete a photo on your device, it is logically deleted and its storage space is freed up for future use. It is not immediately physically removed from your SD card.

NOTE: “In this case, stop using your device as soon as you notice that you have deleted a photo that you want to recover. This will give you the best chance of recovery before the storage that contained the lost pictures is overwritten.”

Depending on the type of device you have, accessing the memory card or area were recently lost photos are made available for recovery will differ. For example, if you were using an SD card on your Mac and you deleted some pictures, you would check either the Recently Deleted folder in the Photos app or your Trash can for the files.

Once you’ve opened the Photos app, navigate to the Recently Deleted folder and see if there are any photos. If so, you can move them back to the album of your choice. They will stay here for around 30 days which gives you time if you realize that you want something back. A similar procedure does apply to Android devices and many other digital cameras and mobile devices.

Way 2: Recovering from a Backup
An SD card is used for long-term storage of digital photos or for expanded capacity on a photographic device. If you have just taken a photo and then deleted it mistakenly there was probably no time the backup up your photos.

If it’s a card you use for transferring photos to be viewed on different devices and the pictures have been resident on the card for some time, it would be best for you to create a backup of those photos.

It is totally up to you the way you choose to back up the photos that live on your SD card. You might use Time Machine or iCloud to protect SD cards used with your iOS devices. However, it is strongly recommended that you use iCloud as it’s wireless and you don’t have to remember to back up your device.

When you plug your iPhone into charge and it’s connected to Wi-Fi, it will start backing up on its own. You don’t even have to remember to initiate the backup process.

Apple has a create ‘walkthrough’ option on how to use Time Machine. Whatever way you choose, making backups of your data is not something that is restricted to desktop and laptop machines. You should be backing up the data on your mobile devices and that includes any photos that you may have imported to them from an SD card.

NOTE: “In cases of loss or theft of an SD card, a backup may be the only way to recover your photos. Most people think that data loss won’t happen to them, I would recommend that you start backing up sooner rather than later.”

Way 3: Recovering from Cloud Backup
Android users have multiple options as they can not only tell their smartphones to store photos on a removable SD card, but they can also take advantage of apps like OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Photos to back up everything to the cloud.

If you have the same case, then you should be able to recover each and every deleted photo just by downloading it from the cloud storage service that you like. Best of all, you can do so from anywhere and on any device, so this method can save you even if you lost your device or someone has stolen it.

Use the following to see official guides on how to download files from popular cloud storage services:

OneDrive
Dropbox
Google Photos
In case you use a different cloud backup app and are not sure how to download your deleted photos from it? Then we recommend you consult Google and look for a suitable guide.

Way 4: Android Data Recovery App
You can use an Android data recovery app like DiskDigger photo recovery if you need to recover deleted photos from an SD card that was used to expand the storage space of your Android smartphone or tablet.

To recover deleted photos with DiskDigger:

Download DiskDigger from the Play Store.
Launch it and scan your SD card (usually appears as “/mnt/sdcard” or something similar).

Specify the file types you would like to search for and tap OK.

Select the files you want to recover.

Tap the Recover button to save them to your device.

Your device should be rooted for the best results and you should use DiskDigger Pro instead of the free version. Don’t expect to find as many deleted photos as with desktop data recovery software like Disk Drill, which we describe next.

Way 5: Use of Data Recovery Software
In some cases, neither of the above solutions gives the required result. In this case, we can now use Disk Drill to recover the photos from our SD Card.

Disk Drill is a data recovery app that will help us retrieve deleted pictures from our SD card. Disk Drill can recover almost any file format, including RAW images as well!

FAQ
How to recover deleted photos from an SD card?
How to recover photos from a corrupted SD card?
How can I recover deleted photos from my SD card for free?
How to recover deleted photos from a memory card without the software?
How to recover deleted photos from an SD card on an Android phone?
How Do I Recover Photos From a Sandisk SD Card?
Can You Recover Photos From a Formatted SD Card?

About Zaheer Ahmad

Muhammad Zaheer Ahmad is a senior journalist having more than 20 years of experience. He has served both print and electronic media at senior positions. Currently, Zaheer is associated with a leading news channel of Pakistan as Sr. Producer News. He is also the Managing Editor of Newsmakers.Com.Pk. Zaheer can be reached at zaheer.ahmad.lhr@gmail.com

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