My husband and I both do brand inspections. His phone kept getting clogged up, (with over 15,000 pics on it!) and requires a data connection to pull up the pictures. And then the camera app would crash. So I went to Walmart and bought him a Vivitar digital camera. Everything was going well until yesterday. He had the SIM card in his tablet/laptop combo and went to his gallery to work with pictures from his phone and when he went back to pull pictures from his SIM card they were all gone! Every last one of them had been wiped out! So now for the next two days we have to go back to all of the locations (about 15) and retake pictures that were taken with the camera. Can anyone tell me what happened so we can make sure it does not happen again?? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I don't know anything about Vivitar. I have a Nikon that works great and only cost me about $100, though I use it rarely because I have a Samsung Galaxy S9+ phone with a ton of memory. I can only guess that somehow he did not save the photos properly.

The pictures are stored on the sim card that you move from the device to the computer. The only thing I think was somehow his tablet reformatted the disk because he didn't have the lock on it.

Yes, I understood that they were on the SIM card. Perhaps go to Vivitar support for info on how to prevent this in the future.

The easiest way to handle this issue would be to use photos.google.com (google photo app) as it backs up the pictures and allows you to clear them off your device without loosing them, so there is never a need to have 15,000 pictures on your phone. Also, its much cheaper then a camera, since it is free with your google email account, which is also free. Hopefully this option could work for him.

Oh yeah, I forgot Google backs up all of my photos that are on my phone. It does that automatically and I never gave it much thought.

It is not going to back up a camera with no data, or internet connection. The question is about the camera not the phone!!! His phone does not have data, I've told him after he emails the picture to delete it but he doesn't like fighting with the phone. We are discussing getting him a new phone but right now can't afford it. Please, I'm only asking about the camera, NOT THE PHONE. My phone has data and backs up to google photos, and I port them to my computer and delete them off of my phone. I have less than 500 pictures on my phone so I know he needs a new phone but we don't have the money right now. I used the Walmart card to buy a $40 cheapy Vivitar 20 megapixel phone from the electronics department. no monthly bill! A phone will cost $100 out of pocket plus double my monthly bill. (50 to activate a new line, plus another 50 for the screen protector and case, my monthly bill will go up from 42 a month to 94, with insurance, since my phone is my source of income {along with my car} I pay the 7 dollars a month for full insurance on my phone. I get the auto pay discount.

Your original post is confusing because you refer to using a camera with a SIM card. A SIM card is only used with a phone. I think you are referring to a SD card which is used for memory in a camera. Can you see the pictures if you put the SD card back in the camera? If you accidentally deleted the photos there are several approaches to recovering them. If the card got reformatted somehow, you may be out of luck. See below:

[havecamerawilltravel.com]

Perhaps the phone saved the pictures to the phone itself and not to the SD card.

@kenasch wrote:

Your original post is confusing because you refer to using a camera with a SIM card. A SIM card is only used with a phone. I think you are referring to a SD card which is used for memory in a camera. Can you see the pictures if you put the SD card back in the camera? If you accidentally deleted the photos there are several approaches to recovering them. If the card got reformatted somehow, you may be out of luck. See below:

[havecamerawilltravel.com]

Your right I was calling the SD card/SanDisk a SIM card thank you very much for this link. I'm going to try the different recovery programs in a few minutes.

It's possible that the photos were saved to the memory of the camera and not to the SD card? I have had that happen to me. Have him check the camera to see if the photos are on it. If they are then he can move them to the SD card and transfer to his computer. Good luck!

If you are using a digital camera and an SD card, here are a couple of ideas:
1) Check your SD card for a "lock" Make sure it is on "lock". Also, did you review the photos after taking them? If not, maybe you really didn't have the camera set up to "save' the photos.
2) Stick the card back in the camera and keep it there! Instead, use a cable to download into your computer. As others have said, the photos may be in your camera's internal memory. For me the best way to ascertain this is the cable to computer method. This can be especially true if you did not set up your camera.
3) Go through your camera's menu. It may have a file for deleted photos. It may named a "recycle bin" or something similar.
4) In the future, take your tablet or laptop with you. Always use the cable to download the photos from your camera into the computer. For me, I do this at the site. I "cut and paste" the photos into a designated file on the laptop. Then, while still at the shop location (in your car), review and name the photos to ensure you took all the required photos.
5)Don't use "Bluetooth" or any wireless methods. Cable is always good. BTW, I even use a wired mouse rather than the computer's pad or a wireless mouse. To me the occurrence of error with wireless methods makes a wired method important. Besides, the wired mouse can be purchased used for a few dollars at most resale type shops.
6) Lastly, familiarize yourself with the new camera.

Apologies in advance for numbers 4, 5 and 6. Those are unasked pieces of advice.

CoffeeQueen's suggestion is worth looking into. And next i would try the data recovery programs on the SD card.

I have at times been able to recover deleted files from an SD card. The advice to use the "lock" feature on the SD card is useful AFTER you take the photos. If you have the SD card locked, you can not save new pictures to it. The reason you may be able to recover deleted photos (assuming the SD card has not been reformatted) is that deleting a photo is the same as deleting a file on a PC, the actual data is not deleted, just the path to find it. But, for both a phone SD card and a computer drive, DO NOT save anything new until you have recovered the deleted files. Deleting a file (or photo) allows that space to be used again.

Ok, update. Thanks for the advice.
@kenasch I owe you a debt of gratitude. After returning to South Georgia yesterday to retake pictures for 4 Red and blue gas stations for MCX got back home at 11:30 pm planning on a route to N. Georgia today to retake pictures that were missing from 4 blue and white stations and three red and blue stations another long ride/ and long day I read your post. I tried the "free" recovery download first without success, it found "txt" files and no pictures. I then downloaded RescuePro and my husband found the license key in the package and it would not work. My husband read the paper with the license key and said it said to do RescuePro deluxe. The license key now worked and I ran it one time and guess what?
all 1200 and something photos were found!!! You saved us a long grueling day with little time to input afterward! It was three am, and we knew we did not have to drive to North Georgia today we could spend the day inputting instead.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I have never owned a digital camera before and have very little experience with SD cards, (remember the floppy disk? that's what we used when I was in college, lol). I knew someone on here would be more technologically up to date than me!

Thank you.

Your welcome. Glad it worked. I hope you were able to recover the photos with the free evaluation version of the software. It looks to be expensive otherwise.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2019 06:00AM by kenasch.

If you buy a "real" SanDisk it comes with a license key, from what I gather I believe. No, I didn't have to pay for anything. I read a lot of the article that you sent me. I had no idea there was a difference in SDCard brand, but now that I know, I will stick with SanDisk.