How to Recover Videos/Photos from DJI Phantom, Inspire or Mavic drones

Offering a generous array of features, DJI drones – Phantom, Inspire, and Mavic are known for their portability, flight time, stabilized the camera, precise satellite positioning, obstacle avoidance sensors, and much more. They are popularly used by wedding photographers, videographers, organizations, and even college students to supplement projects with high-quality footages. But what if you lose your aerial photos and videos captured by DJI drone cameras? However advanced DJI Phantom, Inspire or Mavic may be, they are all susceptible to data loss.

Why did I lose DJI drone camera recordings?

All the videos and photos captured by DJI drone cameras are recorded in the high-speed UHS-1 or 2 SD cards. The images and videos are usually of JPEG, DNG (RAW), JPEG + DNG, MP4, MOV (AVC/H.264; HEVC/H.265) format. Like any other memory card, the drone SD cards are also prone to loss, accidental deletion, and corruption. You might lose DJI drone images/videos due to:

• Improper handling of the storage card
• Formatting
• Accidental deletion
• Virus/malware infection
• Abrupt shutdown of the system during transfer or sharing of files

1. Recover lost videos, photos from DJI Go App on your phone/Tablet

Situation: ‘Due to strong winds my DJI Mavic went down in the sea. Although it is impossible to find my drone camera but can I at least get back the videos of my lost drone?’

When you are using DJI Go App on your phone or tablet, the videos and photos of your drone camera get automatically saved on the mobile device. Thus in situations like above, you can recover lost DJI drone camera footages from the DJI Go App on your phone or Tablet. But the size of these files is too small as compared to the same multimedia files saved on your drone’s SD card.

However, it is a useful feature in the event of catastrophic loss of your DJI drone. You can at-least have the cache video recording of the last moments of the drone’s flight and understand what went wrong.

You can always turn on/off ‘Cache during video shooting’ in DJI Go App under ‘General Settings.’

2. Use Drone Camera Photo/Video Recovery Software

Situation: ‘I am a DJI Phantom 3 owner. I formatted my SD card through the DJI App, not realizing that it just deleted the videos on the card. Is there any way to restore the lost DJI videos?’

A secure drone camera data recovery software is the best way to DJI Mavik, Inspire, or Phantom videos/photos recovery from SD cards.

The photos and videos in DJI drones are usually of high resolution, 4K HD quality stored in Class 10 or UHS-1 SD cards. Thus always choose a software that is capable to recover files without hampering their original high quality.

Stellar Photo Recovery available for both Mac and Windows systems is one of the highly capable applications which has proved to be successful in any kind of photos or videos loss situation from the drone cameras. It is fast with advanced scanning capabilities and has an intuitive interface.

The do-it-yourself software restores DJI photos/videos lost due to deletion, corruption, virus infection, formatting and during transfer or sharing among devices/computer. Stellar Photo Recovery supports lost drone videos/photos recovery from Mini SD cards, Micro SD cards, SDHC and SDXC used in DJI drone cameras.

It aids not just DJI Inspire, Phantom, or Mavik videos recovery but supports all other DJI models too.

3. Perform Chkdsk

Situation: ‘I connected the DJI SD card to my PC but it reads the error ‘SD card is damaged. Try reformatting it.’

Whenever your drone camera SD card gives error like above or asks to format before opening, the chances are that your SD card has got corrupt. Perform Chkdsk (check disk) to fix the issue by following the below steps:

Whenever your drone camera SD card gives error like above or asks to format before opening, the chances are that your SD card has got corrupt. Perform Chkdsk (check disk) to fix the issue by following the below steps:

• Go to Windows Start option
• Type cmd in the Search box
• Right-click cmd and select the Run as Administrator
• In the command prompt, type chkdsk < SD card drive letter>:/f (e.g., chkdsk E: /f). Hit Enter.
• Now check again if you can access DJI videos and photos saved in the SD card.

4. Reinstall the driver

If your PC does not recognize the drone camera’s SD card, try to reinstall the driver by below steps:

• Go to This PC and right click on it
• Click on Manage > Device Manager > double-click Disk Drives
• Right-click on the name of your removable drive
• Click Uninstall
• Disconnect your SD card and restart your PC
• Reconnect your SD card, the system will detect it now

5. Assign a new drive letter

Situation: I connected my DJI Inspire drone’s Micro SD card via card reader to PC but the error ‘Please insert the disk into drive E:’ appears.’

The error indicates that the drive letter assigned to the drone’s SD card is already used. So assign a new drive letter to your SD card by following the given steps:

• Connect the SD card to the PC
• Open the Run dialogue box and Type msc and hit Enter
• Under Storage tab choose Disk Management
• Right-click the drive you want to assign a letter on the right pane
• Choose Change Drive Letter and Paths
• A dialog box will appear, click on Change
• Check-in Assign following drive letter
• Choose the letter you want to give from the drop box and click OK
  

How to protect DJI SD cards from photo/video loss?

• Do not try to record footages when your SD card has low storage space left
• Do not shoot in low battery
• Always use DJI recommended SD cards for drone models
• Do not use DJI drone camera SD card in any other device
• Regularly backup & format DJI drone camera SD card

To Wrap Up

DJI Phantom, Inspire and Mavic models are popularly used by photographers and videographers for commercial and personal aerial shoots. Owing to regular usage, transfer, and sharing of drone footages, the photos/videos from the SD cards often get lost or deleted. In such situations, the drone video recovery software – Stellar Photo Recovery is a secure and easier way out with its latest technology and complete support for DJI drone cameras.

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About The Author

Prachi Sahu

is a Writer who likes to blog about technology. She has a keen interest in Data Recovery, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. An avid reader, she has also contributed to some leading newspapers and dreams to own a library some day.