First: stop using the card
Memory cards reuse free space quickly, so the moment you notice photos are missing, take the card out of the camera or phone and stop shooting. Put it in a card reader, connect it to your computer, and recover to your computer's drive — never back onto the card itself.
Use Deep Scan or Carving Only
SD and microSD cards are almost always formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, not NTFS, so there's no Master File Table to rebuild original filenames from. That's exactly what signature carving is for. Choose Carving Only (or Deep Scan, which carves as part of its sweep) and RecoverHelper rebuilds each photo by its signature — even when the filename and folder are gone. If the card is failing and some reads error out, the bad-sector tolerance skips the unreadable areas and keeps going, so a dying card still surrenders most of its files.
Cameras shoot RAW — and RecoverHelper reads it
Beyond JPEG and PNG, RecoverHelper recovers the camera RAW formats photographers actually shoot: CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RAF, PEF and TIFF. It also carves video and audio off action-cam and phone cards — MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, AVI, WebM and MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG.
Free for JPG & PNG — and everything else too
Scanning and recovering JPG and PNG is free, so you can confirm your photos are recoverable right away. Unlock RAW, HEIC, video, audio and partial recovery of fragmented files for free by pairing the free RecoverHelper mobile app — scan the QR code once and this PC stays unlocked.