Use a card reader, not the camera cable
Connecting a camera over USB often mounts it in a restricted mode that only shows current files, not the raw storage. A dedicated SD card reader presents the card as a normal removable disk, which is what a full scan needs to see everything, including deleted data.
Step-by-step recovery
- Remove the SD card from the camera and insert it into a card reader
- Open RecuvaDownload and select the card from the location list
- Run the deep scan directly — SD cards are commonly reformatted in FAT32/exFAT, and quick scan often misses formatted cards
- Filter results by image type (JPEG, RAW) to make browsing faster
- Preview thumbnails where available, then restore to your PC's hard drive
Why fragmentation matters less here than on a hard drive
Cameras typically write each photo as one continuous block rather than splitting it across scattered free space, since they're optimized for fast sequential writes during burst shooting. That's good news for recovery — it means a deep scan is more likely to reconstruct a complete file from a single contiguous region, rather than needing to stitch together fragments the way it sometimes has to on a heavily used PC drive.
Downloading & running RecuvaDownload
1. Install or extract it
Use the Windows or macOS button on this page. For the installer, run it with administrator rights; for the portable ZIP, extract it to a drive you're not scanning.
2. Scan, preview, restore
Pick the drive or device, run quick scan first, switch to deep scan if needed, then restore selected files to a different drive than the one you scanned.
FAQs
Frequently, yes — an in-camera format is usually a quick format that clears the directory but leaves image data in place until overwritten. Deep scan is the mode to use here.
That usually means the space that photo occupied was partially overwritten before the scan. The file may still open in part, or not at all, depending on how much was overwritten.