Lost photos

[Lynjon]

As a new user, this is my first post. Sadly, it concerns a major issue I have just encountered.

I spent Christmas in Cornwall and took some great photos of the local landscape, including some fascinating long exposure shots of the sea (using an ND10 filter). Each day I reviewed the photos on the camera and was very pleased with what I had taken. Yesterday I returned home, took the SD card from the camera and inserted it into my Mac to download the photos. The Mac said there were no photos to download. I then put the card back in the camera and it too said there were no photos. I took a new photo to check that the card was working and it came out fine and I was able to download it.
I am totally perplexed as to what has happened to my photos. I downloaded some data recovery software and did a deep check of the card. Although it did discover some old files it was unable to discover any image files at all.

I am using an EOS 6D and had a 24-104 Canon lens on it. The SD card was a SanDisk Extreme 64GB. When I transported the camera back from holiday it was packed in a camera bag, with no lens but a body cap attached and with a Phottix TR-80 Remote/Timer in the same bag. Given that there were some files on the card, but no image files, it was as if the card had been formatted, but I obviously haven't done this.

I realise that there isn't much I can do about this, but if anyone has any bright ideas about how it might have happened, or how I might avoid it happening again I would be most grateful. The photos I took on my iPhone were of course transmitted immediately to the Cloud, so there was no chance of losing those!

[2Beers]

Re: Lost photos

try sandisks software the see what you can recover as files can be recovered even after a format. Dont write any more to the card as this will overwrite any data that can be recovered.

http://www.lc-tech.com/rescuepro/

[the black fox]

Re: Lost photos

First off welcome to the forum ,the one thing that springs to mind at this time of the year when there's drink ,partying etc possibly involved is have you inadvertently swapped cards and forgotten that you have done it .the simplest solutions are sometimes the ones that are correct

[ColytonJohn]

Re: Lost photos

Welcome Lynjon (is that what you really want us to call you?) so sorry to read that your first post is a tale of woe.

I can only echo what Alex says and that you try other recovery software as it worked well for my cousin when all her shots from an overland trip between Australia and the UK were 'lost'. It goes without saying that, even if successful, you retire that card.

A point worth making despite being a bit late is that the very last thing you ought to do is to 'test' write to a card as you will in all likelihood be overwriting what you want to later recover.

I do like the notion of one sherbet too many and swapping cards

Cheers,
John

[Lynjon]

Re: Lost photos

Welcome Lynjon (is that what you really want us to call you?) so sorry to read that your first post is a tale of woe.

I can only echo what Alex says and that you try other recovery software as it worked well for my cousin when all her shots from an overland trip between Australia and the UK were 'lost'. It goes without saying that, even if successful, you retire that card.

A point worth making despite being a bit late is that the very last thing you ought to do is to 'test' write to a card as you will in all likelihood be overwriting what you want to later recover.

I do like the notion of one sherbet too many and swapping cards

Cheers,
John

Thanks to everyone for the replies. The suggestion to use the SanDisk recovery program was very helpful. I firstly tried their Recovery Pro program. This recovered a large number of photos that I had taken earlier in the year but, bizarrely, not the photos I took in Cornwall in late December. At this point I encountered the company LC Technology Intl, who are actually the authors of the SanDisk Recovery Pro software, in particular a guy there called Grant Woods, who has been very helpful. After I explained the problem he then suggested I use a program called FileRecovery2016 (also written by LC Technology). This seemed to be a much more powerful program which did indeed discover additional files, but as they are contained within a folder I can't tell whether they are the missing files without opening the folders, and I can't do this until I've paid for the program. I'm happy to pay the fee IF my files are there, but a bit reluctant if they are not. The nice Mr Grant Woods is trying to sort this out.

I thought about the dinners I attended over Christmas and the alcohol consumed, but I'm pretty certain that none of the crackers contained another SD card that I might have swapped!

Thanks agin,

Lynton

[ST-EOS]

Lost photos

Lynton it may be worth trying Recuva (free version) to see if it can find any of your images. I've used it to find raw images that had been deleted in error from a drive. You may need to have the card in a reader so that the PC/Mac see's it as a drive. Here's a link for you

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Lynjon]

Re: Lost photos

Thanks, but it looks as if Recuva is only for Windows machines. I use a Mac. I tried to download but it only sent me a .exe file.

[Enigma]

Re: Lost photos

I know this is clutching at straws, but I think you may now be at this stage. Have you tried a thorough crawl through your computer just on the extremely remote chance that the files might actually have been uploaded and then erased from the card ...

[Columbarius]

Re: Lost photos

I had a similar unexpected problem last week, and couldn't load the images that I knew were there. So I put the card in a USB reader and interrogated it with Windows file explorer. Trying to open the files in turn I found one that was clearly corrupted and wouldn't open. I deleted this file and was then able to load the rest into LR.

I'm not 100% sure how to do this on a Mac, but if you can it's worth a try.

[the black fox]

Re: Lost photos

Ahhh your on a Mac ,don't know what you use for p.p but there's a chance the pics might have gone straight into photos ,the rather annoying program that Apple gives priority to .and be lurking in there somewhere .
My next suggestion then would be to search on your Mac for the files .sounds like they have uploaded and been deleted from card

[Bhuna]

Re: Lost photos

Just a thought here but is the EOS 6D wifi?

Could it be you have it set to upload the pictures when connected to your network?

[Lynjon]

Re: Lost photos

Ahhh your on a Mac ,don't know what you use for p.p but there's a chance the pics might have gone straight into photos ,the rather annoying program that Apple gives priority to .and be lurking in there somewhere .
My next suggestion then would be to search on your Mac for the files .sounds like they have uploaded and been deleted from card

Thanks for all the help and advice. It's true, I am now clutching at straws. I've checked thoroughly on the Mac and the missing files are not there. I am not averse to using the Mac Photos program, which seems to work pretty well. But I tend to use Aperture more. (As it's not supported any longer I guess I will have to move to Lightroom in due course.) I'm now awaiting my one last hope, Grant from LC Technology.

Lynton

[PS - what is "p.p"?]

[Lynjon]

Re: Lost photos

Just a thought here but is the EOS 6D wifi?

Could it be you have it set to upload the pictures when connected to your network?

The 6D is indeed WiFi but I hardly ever use it.

[Lynjon]

Re: Lost photos

One last thought on this issue: Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to avoid this kind of problem in the future? Given that it is clearly possible for an SD card to give up the ghost at any time, does anyone follow a routine of, say, downloading images every day to another medium, like a back-up drive, just in case a problem arises with an SD card?

[Columbarius]

Re: Lost photos

Given that it is clearly possible for an SD card to give up the ghost at any time, does anyone follow a routine of, say, downloading images every day to another medium, like a back-up drive, just in case a problem arises with an SD card?

I download to the Desktop after every shoot, these images will then go into my automatic overnight backup schedule. I then format the card in camera.