Picture the guesthouse in Hoi An at the end of a long day. You plug the card into your laptop and the DCIM folder holds forty files where there should be six hundred. Or the card appears as an unreadable RAW drive, with a prompt offering to format it. Nearly everyone’s first move is wrong. They click Format, or slot the card back into the camera to see if it still works, or shoot one test frame. All three write to the card, and writing is what turns a recoverable problem into a permanent one.

Whether you can recover deleted photos from an SD card depends on what happened to it and what has touched it since. This guide explains why recovery is possible at all, what to do in the first few minutes, how software such as Stellar Photo Recovery approaches the job, and where the limits are.

Why Deleted Photos Often Survive

An SD card stores two kinds of information: the files themselves and a set of records describing where they are. Cards up to 32 GB (SDHC) typically ship with the FAT32 file system, and larger SDXC cards use exFAT. In both, a directory entry holds each file’s name, date, and starting location, and an allocation structure tracks which blocks belong to it.

Deleting a photo edits those records. The entry is flagged as deleted and its space is marked available, but the pixels stay where they were until something new lands on top of them. In FAT systems that flag replaces the first character of the filename, which is why some recovered files come back with a name missing its first letter.

A quick format, which is what a camera’s standard Format command does, goes a step further. It writes a fresh, empty set of records and leaves the data area alone. The folder structure and filenames are gone, but the image data is still sitting in the sectors. A tool can find it by scanning for file signatures, the recognizable byte patterns at the start of a JPEG or a RAW file. The trade-off is that carved files lose their original names, and often their folders, though the capture date and camera model stored inside each image remain readable.

Corruption is a different problem. If you pull a card mid-write, or a battery dies during a burst, the records can end up inconsistent. The camera reports “Card Cannot Be Accessed” or “Memory Card Error,” or the computer shows an empty card, 0 bytes, or a format prompt. Often the photos are intact and only the index is damaged. Physical failure, such as water damage, a cracked casing, or a dead controller chip, is its own category, and software can’t read what the hardware won’t deliver.

What to Do in the First Few Minutes

Stop using the card. Take it out of the camera and don’t shoot another frame on it, because new photos are written into the same space the old ones occupy. Decline any offer to format it, and be cautious with the “scan and fix” prompts that operating systems sometimes offer for removable drives, since a repair routine can rewrite the very records a recovery tool would use.

Read the card through a dedicated card reader, not a camera cable, so the camera isn’t a variable. Save anything you recover to your laptop’s drive or an external disk, never back to the same card. If the card is flaky, with dropouts or very slow reads, create a sector-level image once and run recovery on that copy, so the failing hardware isn’t asked to work repeatedly. If the card is physically damaged or can’t be detected reliably, stop and talk to a professional recovery service, because repeated attempts on dying flash memory can make matters worse.

Recovering Photos with Stellar Photo Recovery

PhotoRec is a free signature-based tool, but it runs from a command line. Stellar Photo Recovery is one graphical alternative. Stellar Photo Recovery can recovers photos, video, and audio from SD cards, hard drives, SSDs, and other media, offers a Quick Scan and a slower Deep Scan that searches sector by sector, and runs on Windows 11 and recent versions of macOS.

The workflow below follows Stellar’s product page and knowledge base. Screen wording changes between versions, so compare it against the build you download.

  • Connect the card to your computer through a card reader.
  • Launch the software and choose the file types you want, such as photos.

  • On the “Recover From” screen, select the memory card and click Scan.

  • Let the scan finish. Stellar says a scan can be stopped and resumed later.
  • Browse and preview the results. If your photos aren’t listed, run Deep Scan.

  • Tick the photos you need, or everything, and click Recover.
  • Choose a destination on a different drive and click Start Saving.

A few cautions. Stellar sells Standard, Professional, Premium, and Technician editions, and photo and video repair is tied to the higher tiers, so check what yours includes. Stellar says the free trial lets you scan and preview but not save files. Photographer David Coleman of Have Camera Will Travel reported in 2026 that trial previews of large RAW files were limited, and that files recovered from a formatted card came back under generated names. Trial terms change, so read the current limits first. Stellar also describes disk imaging in the Premium edition, but the same reviewer couldn’t find it in the current Mac app, so confirm it exists for your setup before planning around it.

Can You Recover RAW Files from a Formatted Card?

Often, with real caveats. RAW files are large, commonly tens of megabytes each, and every manufacturer uses its own format: Canon’s CR3, Nikon’s NEF, Sony’s ARW, Fujifilm’s RAF, Adobe’s DNG. Signature scanners need to recognize each one, so format coverage matters more for RAW than for JPEG. Stellar’s documentation lists RAW support for many major camera brands and lets you add custom file types, but a very recent camera may not be covered yet, so check before you rely on it.

Size is also what makes RAW vulnerable. Thirty frames at 50 MB each is roughly 1.5 GB of fresh writes, and every megabyte of it lands on space that may hold your earlier shots. If you kept shooting after a format, partial overwrites are likely, and a half-overwritten RAW file may open with garbled areas or not at all.

Fragmentation is another limit. Once a file is deleted, the record linking its pieces is freed, and a signature scan assumes the file sits in one continuous run. A photo stored in separate chunks tends to come back damaged. Cameras usually write sequentially, but a card that has gone through many delete-and-reshoot cycles is more likely to hold fragmented files.

A secure or overwrite format is built to destroy the old data, so recovery after one is unlikely. A failed controller leaves nothing to scan. TRIM, which tells a drive to discard freed blocks, is mostly an SSD concern and is less of a factor on typical camera cards, though that is a general rule, not a guarantee for any particular card. No tool can promise complete recovery. A scan tells you what is still findable, which is worth knowing before you give up or pay for anything.

Protecting Photos on the Road

Spreading a trip across several smaller cards limits what one failure can take. Copying photos to a laptop or portable SSD every evening means the card is rarely the only copy. Before you clear a card, open a few transferred files and compare the file count, because a transfer that stopped halfway looks fine until you check.

When you do format, do it in the camera, after the backup is confirmed. The SD Association recommends its own SD Memory Card Formatter over built-in operating system tools for SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards. Eject cards through the operating system, keep them in a hard case away from water and heat (monsoon season and boat days are the usual culprits), and swap a tired battery before a long burst so a power cut doesn’t interrupt a write.

Final Thoughts

Recovery tends to succeed or fail on what you do in the first ten minutes. A card set aside untouched gives a scan its best chance, and a card that kept shooting gives it the worst. Software is worth trying when photos are deleted, formatted away, or trapped on an unreadable card and the shots can’t be retaken. Stellar Photo Recovery is one option for compatible cards, and its free scan shows what’s findable before you spend anything. For a damaged card, a professional lab is the better call.

Whatever you recover, copy it to two separate places before you do anything else.