Emergency · high-speed photo card
A photo burst sequence is missing frames
Can missing frames from a burst be recovered?
Short answer
Only if they were written to the card: frames deleted later or lost during ingest can often be found, but buffered frames that were never saved do not exist on it. Use capture times and sequence numbers to pin down the gap, confirm which card was in use, and scan only that card read-only.
The situation
A continuous burst has visible frames before and after a missing section.
Frames on both sides of the hole prove the camera kept shooting through it, so the missing images were written and then removed, or never copied across. That makes this a different case from a burst that simply stopped: here there is something to look for.
01 / Diagnose
Work out what actually disappeared
High-speed bursts produce many files within seconds, and ingest software that stumbles on one of them often continues quietly with the next. Frames also disappear when a rating pass deletes rejects, or when a card was swapped mid-burst. Only frames the buffer never handed to the card are absent from it in the first place.
Some files may have been deleted or lost during ingest, while buffered frames that were never written do not exist on the card.
Check the last known path, trash and backups without writing to the original device.
02 / Protect the source
Preserve the best recovery chance
- 1
Read the capture times of the frames either side of the gap; they show how many exposures the camera fitted in between.
- 2
Establish which card was in the camera at that moment and stop using it, including for any further shooting that day.
- 3
Scan that card read-only for the formats of the burst, JPEG, RAW or both, and keep the search within the relevant capture date.
- 4
Export the candidates to another drive and place them back into the sequence by capture time to see whether the gap closes.
Do not reshoot onto the same card and do not run a culling tool over the folder while frames are missing. A burst occupies a long continuous stretch of the card, so new images land exactly where the deleted frames still are and end the chance to get them back.
03 / Choose the method
Match the tool to the source
For stable, readable exFAT, NTFS and FAT16/FAT32 or uncompressed IMG, DD, RAW and BIN images.
Unconfirmed exports are marked .UNVERIFIED.
Frames that were dropped in the camera were never stored and stay unrecoverable. File Recovery Hero scans exFAT and FAT photo cards read-only for JPEG and supported RAW files; it cannot tell from the card alone how many exposures the camera intended to write.
04 / Verify
Check the recovered content, not just its name
Recovered frames belong to this burst when their capture times fall between the neighbours, the interval matches the frame rate that was shot, and the scene continues without a jump. Each file must also open at full resolution rather than as a thumbnail-sized image.
Keep the source until two verified copies exist. One working preview is not enough.
Sources and technical references
FAQ
Questions about this recovery case
Can high-speed photo card be recovered in this situation?+
Frames on both sides of the hole prove the camera kept shooting through it, so the missing images were written and then removed, or never copied across. That makes this a different case from a burst that simply stopped: here there is something to look for. The result still depends on what remains readable on the source.
What should I avoid before scanning?+
Do not reshoot onto the same card and do not run a culling tool over the folder while frames are missing.
Does scanning write to my memory card?+
Your memory card is only read. Nothing is saved to it.
How do I know whether the result is complete?+
Recovered frames belong to this burst when their capture times fall between the neighbours, the interval matches the frame rate that was shot, and the scene continues without a jump.