Please Help!!! My Photos have disappeared!!!

BekahAura · Jan 5, 2012

I just spent the last 4 hours taking photos of my bird. All I can say right now is luckily I wasn't shooting for a client, but I still want to cry right now.

I was checking the photos all along, so I know there were about 100 photos on my memory card. I popped the memory card into my computer and there are no bird photos... just some photos from last week. So I figure maybe they are on the other memory card (I have a D7000 with duel memory card slots). But there are no images on that one either. So I take the memory card out of my computer and put it back in the camera, hit play... and they've just disappeared!!!

Is there anything I can do to try and retrieve these photos??? There's no way I could have formatted the memory card by accident because there are still 100+ photos on there from last week.

Someone please help, I really want to cry.

Ballistics · Jan 5, 2012

Does the memory card get used in more than 1 camera?

ph0enix · Jan 5, 2012

I'm not sure about the D7000 but my D90 has a feature that allows you to take photos even when there is no memory card in the camera. They don't actually get saved. Could that be it?

BekahAura · Jan 5, 2012

No Ballistics, it's only ever been used in my D7000.

Ph0enix: I'm not sure about that. But I know for a fact I had two memory cards in the camera. I took the pictures, looked through all of them on my camera. Took the memory card out, put it in my computer, and now they are gone.

I'm 100% positive they were there... does anyone know how to restore them? Or if that's even possible?

Ballistics · Jan 5, 2012

Unfortunately this has actually happened to me before. I too have a D7000 and have lost around 200 shots for no reason.

MLeeK · Jan 5, 2012

Try running Recuva on the memory cards and see if you can recover them. Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

BekahAura · Jan 5, 2012

No!!! Don't say that... what kind of crap is this!?

From now on I'm going to use the other memory card as a back-up. I've been googling this problem and it seems like there might be software to recover the files... if anyone has used this kind of software before please let me know.

BekahAura · Jan 5, 2012

Thanks MLeek, I certainly will.

ph0enix · Jan 5, 2012

BekahAura said:
No!!! Don't say that... what kind of crap is this!?

From now on I'm going to use the other memory card as a back-up. I've been googling this problem and it seems like there might be software to recover the files... if anyone has used this kind of software before please let me know.

I've successfully used this several times on corrupt cards:
Photo Recovery Software - CardRecovery Download for Registered Users

Ballistics · Jan 5, 2012

When you say corrupt cards ph0enix, are you saying permanently corrupt or that cards can do this with out warning but go back to normal?

cepwin · Jan 5, 2012

It's possible the files themselves were corrupted so perhaps the sw mentioned above can help with that. What about looking at the 2nd card that was in your camera? The card itself can't be corrupt as the old pix are on there.

ph0enix · Jan 5, 2012

Usually it's the file system on the card that becomes corrupt. Reformatting the card fixes that type of corruption since the file system is recreated in the process. I've never experienced partial card failure but I suppose that's possible also.

Ballistics · Jan 5, 2012

cepwin said:
It's possible the files themselves were corrupted so perhaps the sw mentioned above can help with that. What about looking at the 2nd card that was in your camera? The card itself can't be corrupt as the old pix are on there.

This is what I was leading towards. I feel like if the card is corrupt she would lose all files.

BekahAura · Jan 5, 2012

Ph0enix: Thanks, that will be the next program I try if this "Recuva" doesn't work. 15% left to process and it found 96 deleted files... and I deleted dozens of photos as I went along setting up my lighting... so I hope it's not recovering those files!!! I don't want the ones I deleted... I want the ones that were taken from me lol.

Cepwin: There are no files on the second card... I did check. The way I have my camera set up now the second card is used only once the first is full. I checked anyway... hoping I was wrong and they were on my camera all along.

What really frustrates me is that it's not like I let these images sit on my camera for days.... I just took them less than an hour before I tried to download them, so it's not like I'm just having a brain fart and they are on another card somewhere. I was just looking at them on my camera!!!