Photos & RAW · professional shoot card set
Photos missing after a shoot: inventory cards before recovery
What can I do when shooting photos have disappeared?
Short answer
First reconcile before scanning: match card labels and file-number ranges against your destination folders to see which frames are really missing. They may sit on a card that was never ingested, in a renamed folder, or behind deleted exFAT entries. Scan only the card you have identified as the source, and only read-only.
The situation
Expected frames are absent after ingest, culling, or card rotation.
Frames missing after a shoot are more often misplaced than deleted. Card rotation, a renamed destination folder, and an ingest that stopped halfway all produce the same symptom, so the first job is to establish which physical source actually holds the gap you are looking at.
01 / Diagnose
Work out what actually disappeared
Three causes look identical in Finder or Explorer. A card went back into the bag before it was ingested; the ingest ran but wrote into a folder that was later renamed or moved; or entries were deleted from the card during culling. File numbering separates them, since the camera counts upward across cards and a destination gap matching numbers a card still shows is no loss at all.
The loss may be on an un-ingested card, in a renamed destination folder, or in deleted exFAT entries.
Check the last known path, trash and backups without writing to the original device.
02 / Protect the source
Preserve the best recovery chance
- 1
Lay out every card from the job and record the first and last file number each one still shows, deleting and formatting nothing.
- 2
Search the whole ingest volume by file name and capture date, including recently renamed folders and any temporary import directory the software used.
- 3
Once a card is confirmed as the only source of the gap, scan it read-only for the formats that camera records and nothing else.
- 4
Export the finds into a new folder on a different disk and merge them into the shoot structure by capture time, keeping the recovered set marked.
Do not start a fresh ingest over the same destination while frames are unaccounted for, and do not reuse any card from the job. A second import can rename or replace files, which makes the comparison between card and destination impossible to trust.
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.
Reconciling and scanning finds what is still on the media. If an ingest deleted the destination copy on an SSD, TRIM may have cleared those blocks already, and File Recovery Hero reads only exFAT, NTFS, and FAT volumes, not APFS or ext4 destinations.
04 / Verify
Check the recovered content, not just its name
Count before you conclude: the frames per card should match the frames in the destination folder for the same numbering range. Open a sample from the start, middle, and end of each recovered block at full resolution, then confirm the capture times run continuously across the range.
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 professional shoot card set be recovered in this situation?+
Frames missing after a shoot are more often misplaced than deleted. Card rotation, a renamed destination folder, and an ingest that stopped halfway all produce the same symptom, so the first job is to establish which physical source actually holds the gap you are looking at. The result still depends on what remains readable on the source.
What should I avoid before scanning?+
Do not start a fresh ingest over the same destination while frames are unaccounted for, and do not reuse any card from the job.
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?+
Count before you conclude: the frames per card should match the frames in the destination folder for the same numbering range.