Have you used ‘Shift+delete’ that permanently deleted the important photos from your drive? Or accidentally emptied Recycle Bin that contained your photos, from where it could have been retrieved? Or formatted your drive that leads to complete loss of photos stored on it?
You often tend to work in haste and permanently delete the pictures, which you wanted to keep. When such digital photo loss is critical to work or personal memories, getting back the lost photos becomes your dire need. Mostly stored in SD card, memory cards, pen drives, external hard drives or PC drive photos are susceptible to lose due to corruption, virus attack, accidental deletion, formatting, or system crash etc. However, the deleted or missing photos from any drive do not mean complete loss from the drive. Your valuable photos are still recoverable. Only ensure not to use the problem storage drive to avoid overwriting the data.
How to Recover Permanently Deleted Photos?
When you discover the photo loss, immediately stop using the drive and do few hardware checks like if your SD card is not write protected or the card reader/USB port is working fine.
Check your backup drives, if fortunately, you have a backup of your deleted photos on any computer drive, external media, or Cloud Storage. You can restore lost pictures from the backup folders.
If without backup and no hardware issues detected, then use Stellar Photo Recovery to recover the lost photos from any drive.
There are other manual methods to recover permanently deleted photos. Although they do not assure recovery of permanently loss photos, however, you can try them as they might sometimes work in certain situations.
Recover with Stellar Photo Recovery Software
Situation: Photos lost from camera/drones/PC/Mac/Memory cards/SD Cards/SDHC/SDXC/USB Flash Drives/Pen drives/external hard drives.
Reason of loss: Corruption of storage media, formatting of the drive, accidental deletion, virus infection, photo loss during transfer from media to PC, etc.
Stellar Photo Recovery available for both Mac and Windows systems is one of the extremely capable software to recover lost photos shot from any brand of cameras, CCTV, drones, dash cams, and drone cameras etc. It supports photos recovery from all storage media including that of SanDisk, Seagate, Kingston, WD, and Samsung etc.
It enables recovery of all image file formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, or TIFF photos.
The do-it-yourself software restores photos lost due to any reason from your computer or storage media.
Step-by-Step to recover lost photos:
- Connect your memory card to the computer
- Launch Stellar Photo Recovery
- Check in All multimedia files in What to Recover Click Next.
- Select the memory card from where you want to recover. Click Scan
- List of found photos, videos, and audio files appears. Preview and click Recover
- Browse location to save the recovered files. Click Start Saving.
Manual method 1: Perform Chkdsk
Situation: Photos lost from PC/Memory cards/Memory cards/SDHC/SDXC/USB Flash Drives/Pen drives/external hard drives.
Reason of loss: Unable to access photos due errors like ‘SD card is damaged. Try reformatting it’ or ‘You need to format the disk before using it.’
When you are unable to access the stored photos in the storage media recover them by performing Check disk (chkdsk). Connect the storage media to your PC and follow the below steps:
- Go to Windows Start option
- Type cmd in the Search box
- Right-click cmd and select Run as Administrator
- In command prompt type chkdsk < SDXC card drive letter>:/f (e.g., chkdsk E: /f)
- Press Enter
Manual method 2: Reinstall the driver
Situation: Photos saved in memory cards/SD Cards/SDHC/SDXC/USB Flash Drives/Pen drives/external hard drives are not accessible as the system does not recognize the drive.
Reason of loss: Drivers have corrupted due to virus or malware or they are outdated
Uninstalling and then reinstalling the drivers can help your computer to detect storage media and access the photos stored on it. To reinstall the driver follow below steps:
- Go to My Computer/ This PC and right click on it
- Follow Manage > Device Manager
- Double-click Disk Drives from the list
- Right click on the name of your removable drive
- Click Click OK
- Restart your computer
- Connect your external storage media the system will recognize it now
Manual method 3: Assign a new drive letter
Situation: Photos saved in memory cards/SD Cards/SDHC/SDXC/USB Flash Drives/Pen drives/external hard drives are not accessible as the drive letter is not visible in the drives list.
Reason of loss: The driver letter is probably used by another drive.
When you connect the storage drive to the computer, automatically a drive letter is assigned to it. When you do not see the drive letter in the list of drives, manually assign a drive letter to the drive. To assign drive letter follow below steps:
- Connect the storage drive to your PC
- Open the Run dialogue box using Windows+R key
- Typemsc and hit Enter
- Under Storage choose Disk Management
- Right-click the drive you want to assign a letter
- Choose Change Drive Letter and Paths
- A dialog box will appear, click on Change
- Check in Assign following drive letter
- Choose the letter you want to give from the drop box. Click OK
- Close Computer Management window
- Disconnect and reconnect the storage drive and access it
To sum up
Stellar Photo Recovery is a boon for both home users and professional photographers in a situation of photos loss. The software is safe and efficient enough to restore your lost memories from any storage media.
Finally, an unpredicted photo loss can happen with anyone. It is better to manage your photos by maintaining multiple backups.