How can I recover deleted photos from my Canon camera?

“Hi. I have a Canon DSLR and I accidentally deleted some important photos from it. I want to recover them but don’t know how. Can you tell me how to recover deleted photos from Canon camera? Thanks in advance!”

It’s undoubtedly a painful experience to go through when you accidentally delete something from your camera, phone, computer, or any other gadget. The recovery process isn’t that simple in most cases, especially if you don’t have the right tools for the job. As you’ve deleted photos from your Canon camera accidentally, you might be wondering how to get them back. Don’t worry — this article explains how to do it step by step! Let’s get right into it.

  1. Part 1: Things to Know Before Recovering Photos from Canon Camera
  2. Part 2: How to Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera
  3. Part 3: Tips to Protect Canon Camera Photos from Deletion
recover deleted photos from canon camera - select a location

Part 1: Things to Know Before Recovering Deleted Photos from Canon Camera

Before you approach the Canon photo recovery solutions, there are some important things you should know beforehand. Keep them in mind will maximize your chances of being able to recover your lost photos.

  1. After you’ve deleted the photos accidentally, stop using the camera immediately. If you keep using the camera to take new photos, they might overwrite the storage holding your deleted photos. To maximize your chances of recovering your images, remove the SD card from your Canon camera and proceed with the guide below ASAP.
  2. Use a high-quality SD card reader to connect your card to your computer. A lower-quality card reader can corrupt the recoverable data, which you obviously want to avoid.
  3. If your camera is connected to a cloud storage service using WiFi, make sure to check that cloud storage from your phone. There are some chances that the photos you’ve deleted have been backed up to the cloud, and you could download them from there.
  4. Choose a reputable and reliable data recovery tool to retrieve deleted photos from the SD card of your Canon Camera.

Part 2: How to Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera

It’s time to see how to recover deleted photos from Canon camera. Depending on whether your deleted photos have been backed up or not, the methods used for Canon photo recovery vary.

Way 1. Quickly Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera with Tenorshare 4DDiGHOT

Let's start with the most easiest solution-Tenorshare 4DDiG. It's one of the best Canon photo recovery software that can help you recover deleted photos from canon camera SD card within a few clicks. In addition to photos, this tool is capable of recovering other lost data including videos, audio and documents from different devices, such as SD cards, USB drives, internal and external drives, etc. With this tool, you can definitely recover your precious photos from your Canon camera.

Here are the highlight features of Tenorshare 4DDiG.

  1. Recover accidentally-deleted data from your PC/laptop’s internal storage.
  2. Recover deleted data from external drives, like external HDDs, SSDs, USBs, and SD cards.
  3. Recover over 1,000 file types with a few clicks.
  4. Recover corrupted data from internal or external drives.
Video Tutorial on How to Recover Deleted Photos from Nikon Camera SD Card

If you’d like to follow our video guide to recover your photos using Tenorshare 4DDiG, check out the video below.

Simple Steps to Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera

Lastly, here’s exactly what you need to do to easily recover your lost photos from your Canon camera. You can follow the step-by-step guide below to recover data from any external drive, not just an SD card.

  1. Download and launch 4DDiG on your computer. Remove your SD card from your Canon camera, put it into a card reader, and connect it to your computer. Now you should see the card as an external drive in 4DDiG.

  2. Choose your SD card from the External Drives section. Then click "Scan", the tool will start finding the lost or deleted files.

    recover deleted photos from canon camera - select a location
  3. When you see the photos you want to recover, you can stop or pause the scanning. Preview the photos and make sure you’re recovering the right images.

    recover deleted photos from canon camera - select a location
  4. After selecting the photos you want, hit the “Recover” button and wait for the process to complete.

    recover deleted photos from canon camera - select a location

Way 2. Utilize CMD Prompt to Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera

If you don’t want to use recovery software for some reason, you can use CMD prompt for the job. However, be noted that this method isn’t remotely as efficient or successful. We highly recommend you use 4DDiG instead.

That said, here’s how to recover deleted photos from Canon camera free using this method.

  1. Connect your SD card of the Canon camera to your computer using a card reader.
  2. open Run Command windows by pressing Win + R keys together, type "cmd" and hit enter.
  3. Type “chkdsk E: / f”. If the drive letter of your SD card isn’t E, you can replace the E here with the correct letter. Afterwords, hit Enter.
  4. Confirm your action by tying and Entering Y.
  5. Type “E” (the drive letter of your SD card) and hit Enter again.
  6. Finally, type “E:\>attrib -h -r -s /s /d *.*” and hit Enter. Again, replace E with whatever drive letter your SD card has.

    how to recover deleted photos from Canon camera free

Your recovered photos will be saved on your SD card.

Way 3. Recover Deleted Photos from Canon Camera via Backup

Alternatively, if you have turned ON automatic photo backup to cloud storage, you can recover your photos from there and put them back in your SD card.

Wondering how? Here’s how to recover deleted photos in Canon camera.

  1. Open the cloud storage you use for your camera, on the browser of your computer.
  2. Find the backed-up photos (if any). Download them.
  3. Connect your SD card to your computer.
  4. Copy the photos and paste them to your SD card.

Tips to Protect Canon Camera Photos from Deletion

Here are some tips you should keep in mind to avoid data loss.

  1. Always back up your important photos from your camera to your computer regularly.
  2. Consider using a cloud storage solution to store your photos online.
  3. Use a high-quality SD card from a reputed brand, like SanDisk.
  4. Use a high-quality card reader to connect your card to your computer.
  5. Don’t format your SD card unless needed.

The Bottom Line

This is it, now you know how to recover deleted photos from Canon camera!

The best course of action is to use a dedicated recovery tool, like Tenorshare 4DDiG. Alternatively, you could use the Command Prompt, but it’s not really that effective of a method.

4DDiG - Mac/Windows Data Recovery

Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery

4DDiG is your second to none choice to recover all lost data on Windows/Mac computer from various loss scenarios like deletion, formatting, RAW, etc. with a higher success rate.

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