Lost media?

[mjashman]

I've shot a little over a thousand pictures since getting an XT5 nearly a month ago. Except for one memory card transfer, I hadn't moved any of these pictures to a hard drive.

Last night I was at a party and let a friend play around with the camera, taking some pictures. She's a photographer herself, and not completely ignorant of how cameras work or anything.

This morning when I was looking through the pictures she took, I realized that a good 500-600 of my pictures from the last few weeks are missing. They're not all gone, but a significant chunk don't seem to be anywhere on the card.

Any idea what could have happened and if there's any hope of finding/saving these lost images somewhere? I don't understand it: she didn't format the card on accident, since a few hundred pictures of the more recent pictures are still there; it's a 256gb card that wasn't anywhere near full, so it couldn't have started writing over the older images (I'm not sure if that's something Fujifilm would do anyway?); and it seems highly unlikely that she would have been able to delete them one by one, or even in a huge group, certainly not intentionally but not even accidentally.

So what are the options here? What might have happened and what can I do, if anything?

[jerryy]

It is possible to select a batch of images while in the playback mode to delete all of the selected images at once, your friend could have accidentally deleted some of your images while intending to only remove ones they took.

https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-t5/playback/menu_playback/#:~:text=Select FRAME for ERASE in the playback menu.,Additional pictures can be deleted by pressing MENU%2FOK.

Hopefully you have not tried using that card to get more images since then. You did not mention which manufacturer made the card, but if it is a Sandisk card, you may be able to use Sandisk RescuePro or Sandisk Rescue Pro Deluxe to recover the images.

If another company built the card, they may have similar recovery software or failing that, look on the internet for sd image recovery programs. You install the software on your computer, put the card in a connected card reqder and let the sotware work. It can take a while.

p.s. Welcome to the forum, hopefully your next post will be under better circumstances.

 

Edited October 7, 2023 by jerryy