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Photos · cards & phones

Where the photos were decides everything.

Your answer will fall into one of four categories, ranging from “yes, almost certainly, and for free” to “not by us, but we know where you might find them.” Identifying your category takes a moment and will determine your course of action.

Cards, phones & RAW
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// the short version

Stop shooting. Take the card out.

The worst possible thing to continue doing after erasing images is shooting pictures, since with every new picture taken, it's going to go on top of a deleted one and occupy its place. A single burst could overwrite dozens of them.

Marked
Not erased
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×Don’t format the card and don’t let the camera “repair” it. Cameras provide an option to fix problems that may be occurring with the card. However, when you choose this option, the camera will write a new file system over the top of the images. If these images are important to you, remove the card from the camera and place it somewhere else.
// the source decides it

Card, phone or computer are three different answers.

Deleted photographs from a memory card are among the easiest items we have to recover. Since removable media does not have TRIM, all the image data remains in physical form until overwritten, so if a card is put away right after deletion, you're likely to see almost all of the images recovered.

Photographs deleted from the internal memory of a mobile phone represent some of the hardest data to recover. This is due to most modern smartphones automatically encrypting their contents and freeing up the space taken by the deleted files in an aggressive manner, leaving these files unreachable through any software after they have been released.

The position of computers between the two will vary depending upon whether they use either a hard drive (mechanical) or a solid-state disk (SSD).

// before anything else

Check these, they are free.

Recently Deleted, on phones. Apple iPhones (iOS) and Android phones retain deleted photos for approximately 30 days. This has resolved more enquiries than all other technical measures combined.

Cloud backups. Automatically syncing cloud photo storage accounts (Google Photos, iCloud, OneDrive, Amazon Photos) often store photos regardless of how long a device retains access to the data.

Stop using the card or drive. Each time you take a new photo, the new image will overwrite an older one in the same space; however, there is nothing you can do about which photo it is.

Do not reformat to fix it. When you reformat a disk, it simply writes a second file system over the top of the first and damages whatever remnants of the original organisation were left intact.

// questions

Answered.

First, check Recently Deleted and your cloud account. If none of these locations contain the missing photos, unfortunately, we cannot assist. Phones have internal memory that is soldered to their boards; therefore, we cannot retrieve data stored on the phone’s internal memory.

The missing photos are very likely to be retrievable. Digital cameras perform a quick format; this results in a re-write of the directory while leaving images intact.

If the file system has survived, then yes. Typically, after a disk format, image files that were on the disk will appear in a numbered sequence. However, the capture date remains stored as an EXIF value within each file, so you can still determine the correct sequence by the captured date.

The first part of the original file remains intact, with the rest being written over; this is how they exist on disk, and we therefore recover and return those files (as opposed to deleting them).