A memory card failure has a special cruelty: it usually happens on the day that mattered — the wedding, the drone survey, the once-only interview. So this page starts where you might be standing: at the venue, camera in hand, card throwing errors. What you do in the next ten minutes decides more than anything we do later.
The moment a card errors, misfiles or shows folders it shouldn’t: stop shooting on it. Every further frame can overwrite one you already made. Don’t format “to fix it”, don’t let the camera repair the card, don’t chimp through images forcing re-reads of a failing chip. Eject it, cap it, label it, swap to a spare — the day continues on fresh media while the wounded card waits, unpowered, for the bench.
Photographers who follow that protocol lose a handful of frames. The heartbreaking jobs are the cards that were “tested” in three readers and reformatted twice before anyone called.
Inside every SD, microSD and CompactFlash card sits the same pairing as a USB stick: a cost-engineered controller in front of NAND flash that’s tougher than its minder. Corruption after an interrupted write, a controller that locks the card read-only or kills it entirely, counterfeit cards whose real capacity runs out mid-shoot — different stories, one ending: the frames are usually still in the flash, waiting to be read around the failed part.
Physical breaks — snapped microSDs, cracked SD shells, bent CF pins — join the same queue: direct chip reads, files rebuilt from the raw dump.
Recovery is imaging the card once, gently, then carving: JPEGs, every RAW dialect — CR2 and CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG — and the video containers, MP4, MOV and the fragment-happy AVCHD, reassembled from their signatures when the file table is beyond trusting. Video needs particular patience, because cameras scatter long recordings and a naive tool returns a folder of unplayable stubs. What you get back is checked: images that open, footage that plays, organised so the shoot makes sense again.
USB sticks and memory cards are a fixed £250 + VAT, including snapped connectors and chip-level reads. The rare monolith exception is quoted in writing before anything is attempted. Every job starts with a free diagnostic and ends the same way it was quoted: the figure goes in writing before a single sector is read, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay unless your data comes back. No hourly meter, no surprise “evaluation fee”, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Usually not — an in-camera format writes a small fresh index and leaves the underlying frames alone. The images sit recoverable until new shooting lands on top of them, which is why the card must be retired the moment you realise. Formatted-then-stopped cards are among our highest-recovery jobs.
Grey halves and shredded previews mean the reads are failing partway through each file — a controller or flash fault, and every re-open stresses it further. Stop browsing the card. We image it once and rebuild each frame from the raw data; many “broken” images come back whole when read properly rather than repeatedly.
Often, yes — long recordings are stored fragmented, and when the index dies a generic tool returns stubs that no player accepts. We reassemble the streams from their structure and deliver footage that actually plays. Send the card itself, not an exported copy; the fragments’ layout is part of the evidence.
All of them — SD and SDXC, microSD from phones, drones and dashcams, CompactFlash and CFexpress from working cameras, plus the odd XQD. Monolithic microSDs are the fiddliest, read through test points, and still routinely recoverable. One card, one fixed £250, whatever the format.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands or anywhere else in the UK. Either way the work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
One card, one afternoon, and every photograph from a wedding day recovered. Read it →
The frames are probably still there — protect them from the camera, the readers and the “fix” buttons, and let the diagnostic confirm it free. SD card recovery for Glasgow photographers, by hand at Charing Cross or tracked post the same day.