How to Recover Photos & Videos from a Memory Card with Disk Drill

If you shoot enough photos, it’s more a question of when, not if, you’ll find photos missing from a memory card. Maybe it’s faulty hardware. More often it’s the classic self-inflicted one: formatting the card before you’ve fully downloaded everything. It’s happened to me and to every photographer I know.

I’ve covered the options for recovering deleted photos in detail before. This post is a hands-on walkthrough of one specific app: Disk Drill, for Windows and Mac. I first wrote it up years ago; this version is re-tested from scratch (August 2026, current Mac version) on a 32 GB SD card that I deliberately formatted in a Nikon Z8 with 53 photos and videos on it. Because I still had the originals, I could verify the results file by file rather than eyeball them — more on that below.

The short version: Disk Drill recovered every single photo on the card — all 50 of them — as exact, byte-for-byte copies of the originals, and in my testing of the current crop of recovery apps it has become my first recommendation among the graphical options. The interface is the cleanest of them, and its free scan-and-preview is genuinely useful rather than a teaser.

Free vs paid: What you actually get

The free version scans and shows you previews of what’s recoverable, without limits. On a Mac, that’s all it does — actual recovery requires a Pro license (on Windows, the free version will also recover up to 100 MB, which is a JPEG allowance, not a RAW one). Whether that’s stingy or fair depends on how you look at it, but in practice I think it’s the right way around: the scan and previews are the part you need before you know whether it’s worth spending money, and those are free.

And it’s worth spelling out how the upgrade works, because it’s less painful than I expected: when you buy a license, you enter the activation code and recovery unlocks in place — your scan results are still sitting there, and it picks up right where you left off. No rescan, no starting over.

Step 1: Pick the card

Put the card in a reader, open Disk Drill, and you’ll get a list of every drive and volume it can see. You can select either the reader device itself or the card’s volume under it — the volume usually has the friendlier name (mine showed up as “NIKON Z 8,” since that’s the camera that formatted it). Select it and click Search for lost data.

Step 2: The scan

The scan runs all of its recovery methods in one pass — you don’t have to choose between a quick or deep scan anymore, which is one of several ways the app has been streamlined since I first reviewed it. Results appear live, grouped by file type, and you can start browsing them while the scan is still running. My 32 GB card over a USB reader took a few minutes.

One thing to expect on a card that’s been formatted (rather than just having files deleted): the original filenames and folders are usually gone. That’s not a Disk Drill shortcoming — it’s what formatting does — so recovered files come back with generated names, sorted into folders by file type, with a “Reconstructed” section where it has pieced together what it can. Your photos are in there; they’re just not called what they used to be.

Step 3: Previews — where Disk Drill earns its spot

This is the part that separates the current version from the other graphical apps I’ve tested. Click a recovered file — including RAW files: my Nikon NEFs and Fujifilm RAFs both rendered — and you get a proper preview, along with a recovery-chances rating for each file. In my experience, that rating is a reliable gauge: for photo recovery, Disk Drill effectively pins its chances on whether it can show you a clean preview, and if the preview renders, recovery odds are high.

That matters most on a formatted card, where the meaningless filenames would otherwise leave you choosing blind. Being able to see that the important shots are recoverable — before paying anything — is exactly what a trial should do, and I strongly recommend running this free scan and checking the previews before you buy a license. If the photos you care about don’t show up, you’ve spent nothing.

Step 4: Recovery

Select what you want — individual files, folders, or everything — and click Recover. On the free version, this is where you’ll meet the upgrade prompt.

Two practical rules for the recovery itself: always recover to a different drive than the card you’re recovering from, and give it room — a card’s worth of recovered files needs a card’s worth of space. Disk Drill defaults to sensible behavior here, but it’s worth knowing why it asks.

How well did it actually work? (Measured, not guessed)

Because this was a deliberate test, I could do something you normally can’t: compare every recovered file against the original, byte for byte.

• All 50 photos on the card — Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, DNG, Fujifilm RAF, and JPEG — came back bit-for-bit identical to the originals. Not “openable.” Identical.
• That included one DNG that PhotoRec — the free command-line tool I also tested on the same card — failed to recover. Disk Drill’s scan got it intact.
• I only selected the photo categories for recovery, so the card’s three videos weren’t part of this test. Short clips are generally straightforward; long, fragmented video files are the hard case for every recovery tool.

Things worth knowing

• Stop using the card the moment you realize photos are missing. Every new shot written to it can overwrite one you want back.
• File-type labels in the results can surprise you. RAW formats are close cousins of each other, and recovered files occasionally show up labeled as a sibling format. If the file count for your camera’s format looks low, check the neighboring RAW folders and the previews before assuming files are missing.
• Disk Drill can also make a complete backup image of a card and recover from that instead of the card itself — worth using if the card is behaving erratically, since it means reading the fragile card only once.
• The app includes other extras beyond recovery, like S.M.A.R.T. drive monitoring and duplicate finding. They’re fine, but recovery is the reason to be here.

Where to get it

Disk Drill is available for Windows and Mac. Run the free scan first; if the previews show your photos, the Pro license unlocks recovery in place.

Disclosure: for this update, CleverFiles provided a review license for the Pro version. As always, the testing, results, and opinions are my own — the recovery percentages above are measured, and the methodology is described in the post.