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How do I recover photos from a corrupted SD card on Mac?

My rather old MacBook froze and crashed while I had my camera connected meaning I got the message warning me I hadn't disconnected the device correctly. I then found that several 100 random photos had disappeared from the sd card both when you look at it on the camera and when you look at it on the MacBook. The strange thing is the same amount of space still seems to be taken up on the sd card, meaning it's gone from holding 100s of photos (it is 2 GB) down to only holding 40. I have tried a couple of free recovery programs but they can't seem to find the lost photos. Can anybody help me out? There are some photos on there I'd really love back.

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Anna Yuan

Anna Yuan

Answered on Sunday, June 8, 2025

SD card corruption error may be triggered when the SD card has been used on multiple types of devices or has been physically removed from a device unsafely. Normally, when an SD card is corrupted, the files on it can not be read or accessed. That's why you can't see the 100 random photos on your SD card.

I've seen that you've used several free recovery programs to get your important photos back from the corrupted SD card. Have you ever tried iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac? iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is one of the best SD card recovery software in the market to rescue your lost pictures. It is professional, 100% secure, reliable, and easy to use.

This professional data recovery software can easily recover files from corrupted SD cards, external drives, USB drives, etc. This powerful data recovery tool is compatible with Intel Macs and Apple Silicon Macs with M1 and M2 chips and also works on macOS 13/12/11/10.15/10.14/10.13/10.12 and OS X 10.11.

To recover lost pictures from your corrupted SD card on your MacBook, do the following:

Step 1. Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.

Step 2. Connect the SD card and launch the recovery software.

Step 3. Select the SD card under Data Recovery from the left sidebar.

Step 4. Click the Search for Lost Data at the right bottom to start scanning.

Step 5. Filter files by different categories and then preview recoverable files.

Step 6. Select the desired pictures and click the Recover button to save them to a different location.

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