How to recover deleted photos from cameras and SD cards using Photorec

If you accidentally deleted photos from your camera, memory or SD card, or even from the computer and, you are looking for a way to recover the lost photos, the free recovery software PhotoRec can save your day.

Photorec can help you recover deleted photos from memory cards (SD, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, SmartMedia, MMC), digital cameras (Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Sony), hard drives and other storage devices.

In the following steps, you will learn how to recover deleted photos from a memory card, but you can also use it as a reference for recovering lost photos from a digital camera, HD’s and other storages.

1 – Download Photorec for windows. It comes along with another powerful data recovery program named TestDisk. Because of that, the archive you will actually download is: testdisk-7.0.win.zip

2 – Extract the content on testdisk-7.0.win.zip to a folder of your choice on your computer.

Note that you are required to extract the content in the ZIP archive testdisk-7.0.win.zip to a folder. You must not just simply open the ZIP file. It is necessary to extract it to a certain folder and then run the execution.

3 – Open the folder and double click the archive 
“photorec_win.exe” in order to open the program.

4 – When executing, it will list all the storage devices and disc units available or connected to your computer, including your computer’s HD. Use the keyboard arrows to select your memory card and then click “Enter”.

In order to correctly identify it, pay attention to the device size. For instance, in the above image, you can see that the first device listed is the computer’s hard drive (500 GB) and the second one is the memory card (1019 MB).

5 – Select the partition you want to examine. Generally the default value is always correct, given the fact that, PhotoRec itself automatically detects the partition table. So, all you need to do now is just simply press “Enter” to continue.

You can also select the type of archives you want to recover in “File Opt” and the recovery options on “Options”, but, the default values just work perfectly, however, you can always modify it case you don’t succeed.

6 – Next step. It will ask you to select the type of partition. Again, PhotoRec will select the best option for you automatically. Just press “Enter” to continue the recovery process.

7 – Define whether it should search the lost photos in the device’s free space (Free) or in the whole storage device (Whole) and then press “Enter” to move to the next step.

I recommend that you experience the “Free” mode if you don’t succeed, use the “Whole” mode to make an overall search in the storage device, including the disk areas that were rewritten by other archives already.

8 – Lastly, select the destination folder where you want to save the recovered photos.

By default, it saves the photos on folder where the Photorec archives where extracted. Press “C” key to start the recovery of the deleted photos, or use the keyboard arrows to set a different folder.

9 – After finalizing the recovery, it will show the number of recovered archives.

By default, it creates a folder named “recup_dir” inside the folder you set to save the recovered photos. Note that the photos are saved without the original name, as long as it verifies sector by sector of the storage device.

As you noticed, although it runs on a DOS environment, Photorec is very simple to use. If you face difficulties on using it, you can always opt for other alternative programs like ZAR or QPhotorec to also recover lost photos.

That’s it! Anything you want to add or ask? Feel free, I would be glad to hear from you.