How to Recover Deleted Photos from an SD Card

The use of SD cards in most electronic devices, including smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and laptops, has become typical for extending a device’s storage capacity. The best thing about these cards is that they are small but can have space to hold a lot of data, including your precious documents, photos, and videos.

If you ever find yourself running out of storage space, you can easily swap SD cards in and out at your convenience. By storing data on multiple SD cards, you can maintain an extensive library of videos and photographs you might never want to lose.

SD cards offer great flexibility in the amount of storage space you can have in your device. Usually, your data on memory cards is safe. However, there is always a small chance that you might accidentally lose the data on your external storage, and you will need a way to recover the lost information. You may need to carry out a memory card data recovery tutorial to retrieve accidentally deleted photos or data lost on your SD card. 

Three Methods to Recover Deleted Photos from an SD Card

Method One – Recovering Photos from The Device’s Internal Storage

If you have accidentally deleted a photo on your Mac or Windows computer, then the first place to look for them is the system’s internal memory or temporary storage. When a picture is deleted, it is logically gone, and its space is available for future use. However, the photo isn’t physically removed from your SD card immediately.

It is important to remember that you should stop using the device as soon as you notice that you have mistakenly deleted a photo. This will increase your chances of recovering the data from the storage before the space is overwritten. 

How you can recover the lost photo will depend on the type of device you are using to access the SD card and where you will find recently deleted items. If the SD card was accessed on an iOS device, then you may be able to recover deleted photos from SD card.

Go-to albums and check in the recently deleted album for the photos you wish to recover. 

Similarly, on Android devices and most other digital cameras and smart devices, a similar procedure can be used. However, after the photo has been deleted, extensive use of the device will make it impossible to recover the data from the system.

Method Two – Recovering Digital Photos from A Backup

People commonly use SD cards to store digital photos backups and expand the storage capacity of their cameras and phones. So, if you use your SD card to store your essential pictures for an extended period, we would highly recommend you to create a backup of your SD card to be on the safer side.

You can create a backup on any storage device or cloud storage, including Apple iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox – depending on your preference and device compatibility. Let’s show an example here. Here’s how you can recover deleted phots from a Windows PC if you have File History backups.

  1. Step 1: Search for “Restore Files” on the taskbar and choose “Restore your files with File History”.
  2. Step 2: Click on the folder that you stored the deleted files on previously and check if there is a backup of the files you need.
  3. Step 3: Select the deleted files and click “Restore” to recover the deleted SD card data.
click "Restore"

Although SD cards are an excellent medium of storing your essential data; however, it is not the most reliable option. Therefore, it is highly advised to regularly maintain a backup of your SD card data, including digital photographs, and if you keep them physically in the form of gift cards, then it’s good for you. So, you can conveniently recover your precious pictures from the backup storage device whenever required.

Method Three – Recovering Photos with The Help of a Professional Data Recovery Software

When recovering data from your internal storage isn’t possible, or you have no backup copies on other storage; that is when recovery data software comes to help. There are several reliable and efficient data recovery software, and the one we recommend best is iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.

This data recovery software can help you quickly and easily recover deleted pictures from SD card. The free version is capable of recovering data up to 1GB with non-APFS or APFS-encrypted format. Also, it’s the only iBoysoft data recovery software on the market that can recover data from T2-equipped Macs. 

Can You Recover Deleted Images From An Year Ago

The short answer is Yes! However, it is not that simple since recovering photos and images from an SD Card that were deleted a long time ago (a year ago in this instance) greatly depends on the usage and whether or not data has been overwritten.

If new data has not been overwritten on the storage space where the deleted files existed, you can most likely restore the images with the help of data recovery software. Whether it has been a week, a month, a year, or multiple years since you have deleted the image doesn’t matter.

The most important tool that can help you recover deleted images from an SD card is a trustworthy and powerful Data Recovery Software, which can perform a deep scan of the storage device, and quickly restore files that you deleted recently or a long time ago.

First, you will need to download and install the correct version of the data recovery software for your system and connect the SD card you want to retrieve deleted data from:

  • Load: connect and select the SD card with the deleted data you want to recover.
  • Scan: Allow your data recovery software to perform a deep scan of the storage device to find lost data.
  • Recover: Once the deep scan is complete, the software will provide you a list of the extracted deleted files, which you can preview and select the files you want to recover.

Conclusion

There are a few reliable options to recover your deleted photos that were stored on your SD card. However, the availability of a backup and the recovery procedure’s complexity depends on how the photos were deleted.

We again emphasize the importance of creating a backup of your important photos and files so that you don’t have to worry about losing your precious data.

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By Lucas Brown

Lucas is an IT student completing his studies in Networking. He worked at Ycombinator as a research analyst. He loves to write about his technology experiences. He also enjoys traveling and captures the best moments with his Canon 5d lens. He is a review specialist at TechProReviewers.

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