Take the card out now

Every new photo is written into the free space on the card, which is exactly where your deleted photos are. Remove the card from the camera or phone and do not take any more pictures on it.

If the camera or Windows asks “Format card?”, choose No. Formatting makes recovery harder.

Connect the card to your PC

Use a USB card reader or the SD slot on your laptop. The card should show up as a drive letter such as E:. Phones usually cannot be scanned directly (they use MTP), so always take the card out and use a reader.

Scan the card with TEA-disk

  1. Open TEA-disk and in Step 1 choose the card from ...or scan a whole drive. It is marked USB / card.
  2. Click Scan for deleted files. TEA-disk reads the FAT32 or exFAT file system of the card and lists deleted photos with their names, usually in the DCIM folder.
  3. Set the type filter to Photos (or Videos) to hide everything else.
  4. Recover the photos to a folder on your computer's hard disk.

If the card was formatted

A quick format creates a new, empty file table, so the old names are gone. The photo data is often still there. Turn on Deep scan: TEA-disk will read the whole card and find JPG, HEIC, PNG and camera RAW files (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RW2) as well as MP4 and MOV videos by their content.

Deep scan results are named by type and position, for example jpg-0001843200.jpg. Sort by size to find full-resolution photos first.

Photos that open half grey

If part of a photo is grey or corrupted, some of its space was already used by a newer picture, or the file was stored in pieces. Try the other copies you find – cameras often keep a small preview inside RAW files.

Keep your cards healthy

  • Format a card in the camera, not on the PC, before a new shoot – only after you have copied everything off.
  • Use a separate card for each trip and copy photos to two places when you get home.
  • Replace cards that show errors; they are cheap compared to lost memories.

Frequently asked questions

Can I recover photos from my phone's internal memory?

Not with a PC tool: phones connect over MTP and encrypt internal storage. Photos on a removable microSD card can be recovered with a card reader.

Which is better for recovery, FAT32 or exFAT?

Both work. TEA-disk supports FAT32, FAT16 and exFAT, which covers practically every SD and microSD card.

Get your files back with TEA-disk

Free, read-only recovery for hard disks, SSDs, pendrives and memory cards.

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