How to Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera SD Card

Not every photo loss is a disaster. In fact, more often than not, you can recover deleted photos from a Canon camera SD card, whether you accidentally hit delete or the card pulled a fast one on you.

Here’s the deal. As long as the card isn’t physically damaged (cracked, fried, or literally snapped in two – yes, we’ve seen it), your photos are probably still sitting quietly on there, waiting to be recovered. When you delete a photo, the camera doesn’t actually “erase” it. It just marks that space as available. The file itself hangs around until something new overwrites it.

You’ve got a shot at recovery if:

• The photos were deleted, but you haven’t added new ones yet.
• The card was formatted within the camera, but no heavy use followed.
• The card shows up on your computer (even if it says it’s empty or corrupted).

​​So, what do you need to recover those photos? Well, let’s list it out. You’ll need:

• A computer.
• A card reader (unless your computer has a built-in SD slot).
• The SD card from your Canon camera.
• A good Canon camera photo recovery tool.

Let’s get to the most important part of this text. We’ll break everything down into 5 steps. This is the exact process we’ve followed time and time again when recovering photos from Canon cameras, and it works.

Pop the SD card out of your Canon camera (if you haven’t already) and connect it to your computer. If you’ve got a built-in SD slot, great – you’re ahead of the game. If not, grab a USB card reader (they’re not hard to find).

Once your card is plugged in, open up the Disk Drill. You should see your SD card listed right alongside your other drives and connected storage – external disks, USB sticks, all of it. Find your SD card in the list and select it.

Click the Search for lost data button and let the software do its thing.

Now, heads up – the entire scan might take a while. It depends on a few things: the size of the card, how it’s connected (different card readers use different USB versions – USB 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 – the speed difference is noticeable), its current condition, and how many different file systems it’s been through. If you’ve used the same card in multiple cameras or formatted it a few times, that can stretch the process a bit.

As the scan rolls along, Disk Drill starts automatically sorting everything it finds. You’ll see your files pop up in neat categories like Pictures, Video, Audio, Documents, Archives, and Other Files. Your deleted photos should be under Pictures.

You’ve got two main ways to go from here.

If you’re short on time (or patience), once the scan finishes, you can hit Recover All. That pulls back everything the software finds. Just make sure you pick a safe location to save it all (definitely not back to the SD card).

But if you’re hunting for something specific or don’t want to wait you can jump in while it’s still scanning. Click into Pictures or Review Found Items, and you’ll see files as they’re being found in real-time.

If you chose to review the files, you should now see a few categories like Deleted or Lost, Existing, and Reconstructed. Your deleted photos, as you probably guessed, will usually show up under Deleted or Lost.

Since Canon cameras name files something like IMG_0001.JPG or XXXX0001.CR2, you’ll want to use Disk Drill’s preview feature to make sure you’ve found the right ones. It’s simple – just click the little eye icon next to the file name, and you’ll get a full-size preview. There’s also a smaller preview thumbnail on the side when you select a file, which comes in handy for quickly browsing through a bunch of shots.

Whether you have simple JPEGs or Canon’s RAW formats like CR2 or CR3, as long as your OS can open it, you should see a preview right there. And here’s the thing – if you can preview the file, you’re good to go. That means the photo is 100% recoverable, no guessing or luck involved.

Oh, and you might notice that Disk Drill lists a Recovery Chance for every file in its own column. It’s a nice touch – it gives you a heads-up on which files are in great shape and which might be a little trickier to restore.

And final step – time to bring those photos back home.

Select the photos you want and hit Recover. Always recover to a different drive – never the same SD card. This avoids accidentally overwriting other photos you might still be able to save.

Pick your computer’s internal drive or another external device, but definitely not the SD card itself. The recovery process usually doesn’t take long.

Disk Drill in its free version on Windows lets you recover up to 500 MB of data without needing to upgrade to Pro. That might not sound like much at first, but in real-world terms, that’s enough for around 10+ RAW photos or tons of JPEGs if that’s what you’re dealing with. More than enough for a solid test run or even a small recovery session.

If you wonder whether you can just connect your entire camera and recover deleted photos that way – the answer is no. Here’s why.

Years ago, devices used a protocol called USB Mass Storage (UMS), which gave full access to the file system. You could plug in your device, open it like a regular flash drive, and data recovery software could scan every corner of the storage – deleted files and all.

Modern Canon cameras don’t work like that. Instead, they use Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). MTP is great for safely copying your existing photos and videos, but it doesn’t give software access to the file system itself. That means data recovery tools can’t scan for deleted files while the card is still inside the camera.

Before you go, we could’ve burdened you with the usual advice to always back up your photos – you know, like every other guide out there. But let’s be honest, you’ve probably heard that a hundred times already. We trust you get it.

What we really want to leave you with is this – if you lost your photos not because you hit Delete, but because they seemingly vanished on their own, ask yourself this: Have I used this SD card with any device other than my Canon camera? You’d be surprised how often that’s the hidden culprit. Using the same card across different cameras, camcorders, or even computers can quietly mess up the file system and lead to data loss.

That’s why most professionals stick to a simple but effective rule – one SD card, one camera. It might save you a lot of trouble down the line.