off the card that had stored them in a hidden file I coud not view.

General beautiful day in a park in Florida stuff. Not worth trying to recover. I am just worried about future problems. I will replace the card. Thanks for your response.

and against a leafy forest floor. I could clearly see the deer but the digital camera did not register it. I could see it from the viewfinder. But once I pressed click it was gone. Freaky.

When data is misplaced by a drive and can't be accessed it goes into a file to protect it with the highest admin privileges. You can access it yourself but you need to put it in a computer and run a small operating system that you can use to recover the data. All Linux os's can do this. I'm sure mac's can as well since they are a Unix system.

The only reason I explained this is so you're aware that there's a reason the data was lost in the first place. It could be the card, the camera or the formatting that messed it up.

my camera that's the problem.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

I think you will need to stick your wiped SD card into a card reader, rather than recover the files on your HD. Maybe not.

The download link is a little down the page, beneath 'Operating Systems'. Best of luck -Years ago, I used a much earlier version to recover some pix from a drive that had been formatted a couple of times and it worked!

On edit: Gotta add this - if/when you get your photos back, format the card but NOT in your computer. Do it in the camera.

Again on edit: You might find something on this page. http://www.photo-freeware.net/categories/tools/