SD Photo Rescue

What SD Photo Rescue is

SD Photo Rescue is a free command-line tool for recovering photos and videos from formatted SD cards. It can also scan raw disk-image files. The project provides a single Python file that uses only the standard library, so installation is not required. Recoverable media includes JPEG and HEIC photos, camera RAW files, and MP4 and MOV video. Named RAW formats include CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, DNG, PEF, and SRW; Sigma X3F and Phase One IIQ are not handled yet. Users can filter by file type and capture-date range, and optionally use camera megapixels to distinguish full-size files from thumbnails. The tool opens cards read-only and says it does not write to, format, or modify them. It unmounts cards first on macOS and Linux, warning if Linux unmounting fails. Reading a card requires sudo; raw image files do not. Recovered files use capture time as their name when readable, and partially rebuilt files go into a _partial folder. The software is available for Linux and macOS and released under the MIT License.