a7iii - rated a photo and it deleted all photos

[galactic]

Hello,

Please help. I photographed a race today and I was going through the photos and set a single 5* rating for a single photo and immediately the photo became  "unable to display." then going through the other 700 they are all "unable to display."  This is the first time i've ever rated a photo on the camera and was trying out the feature. 

When I try to look at DCIM folder on my mac it says that the entire card is free space. I am having a mild panic attack.  

When I look at the photos in my camera all 700 are there, but every single one is "unable to display"

I'm going to dd dump it on my nix machine. But beyond that I have no idea what to do. 

specs: running ILCE-7M3 version  3.10

Card is a Sony 64gb SDXC I got at a walgreens I think so its probably real. 

Please help! 
Thanks
 

[LiveShots]

I suspect your only option is to try some recovery software to see if the images can be restored.

[VTC]

There's a file on the card that keeps track of all the corresponding images and that got mucked up somehow. I come across this at times. The thumbnail preview image got mislinked but the true image is still intact. Merely viewing the image on the card outside camera can cause issues viewing the image when card is returned to camera. All this begs the question... Why do people do this?

By this I mean edit images in camera? Rating or cropping or rating  or who knows what else to manipulate them. Wait until you can view the on something else than a 3" screen. I don't delete anything in camera until I can get to a 27" screen where I can determine if it's a keeper or not.

Edited December 8, 2020 by VTC