Major SD card problem after trip

J Craig H wrote:

Hello,

I just got back from a 3 week trip to Vietnam where I used the e-pl6 and 17 1.8 a lot.

The problem is that, now that I'm eager to transfer those 900 pictures to my computer, disaster appears to have struck. I used a Sandisk Extreme 16gb card - one of the red 30MB/sec ones from a few years ago, but it hasn't been used that much. I 'think' I formatted it before I used it but I really can't be sure. (I know, lesson learned - always be sure...) When the card filled up I changed it, and the shots were there at that point.

It is very unlikely that you formatted the card if Lightroom found images from 5 years ago!

Now none of the pictures I took show up in Lightroom 6, only shots from 5 years ago that were taken with a different (Nikon) camera. When I inserted the card back into the camera it showed 'card full' and when I hit play it shows 'picture error'. I did an evaluation of the card using RescuePro Deluxe and it only shows the Nikon files. To double check I also tried a different recovery software ('z-a-recovery') - it shows those same pictures along with some FAT files (which I think just refer to the file structure?) and two 'RAW PPM' files of a few thousand KB each.

Basically it's as if those shots were never taken. What I don't understand is this: If the card had become corrupted or some similar error, wouldn't the damaged files at least be visible? Is it possible for them to vanish, apparently without trace, like this? I know I'm jet lagged but this just seems bizarre. I'm pretty certain I'm looking at the right card, and I've transferred all the other cards from my Nikon along with the 300 shots from the epl-6 after I changed cards. I'm happy to provide more detail as needed.

I think it is quite possible that you have mixed up your memory cards. It would be worth double checking all your other memory cards.

I don't really know what I can do at this point and would really appreciate any informed advice. I'm not a novice by any means, but not a hardware guy either and it's obviously mildly devastating to lose so many irreplaceable photos.

You can also run the Disk Utility program supplied with the Mac and use it to verify the "disk" and it should tell you if there are any problems caused by corruption. (Don't use it to repair the disk, however, as that may corrupt your images even more.)