To recreate this situation, I’m going to save some photos of the groovyPost staff to a newly FAT32 formatted USB stick. In this instance, PhotoRec was able to recover all the photos (including some that had been deleted months ago). She was left with no photos on her computer and no photos on her card.

So, the computer wiped the SD card clean even though the photos weren’t saved to the hard drive. The photos didn’t import, but OS X thought they did. My sister-in-law was importing photos to her iPhoto library from an SD card and something went haywire. The Scenario: Photos Accidentally Deleted from a USB Drive #įor the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to recreate a real-life scenario using a USB drive. Undeleting photos and videos are just the tip of the iceberg. Together, PhotoRec and TestDisk are a powerful set of free data recovery tools. It’s a companion program to TestDisk, another open-source program that’s long been used by data recovery gurus for repairing partitions and making non-bootable disks bootable again. PhotoRec is a free and open-source, cross-platform utility that lets you recover data from a hard drive, flash drive, SD card, and other removable media.

Testdisk osx