I used file manager to move photos from the internal memory to a microsd card. The program crashed and all photos are lost. The microsd is unreadable (it says it needs to be reformatted) and none of the internal photos show up. Any help would be appreciated. Phone is not rooted.
Is phone Android or iOS? Here's something for Android---important not to use your phone for anything until photos are recovered.
Android
That one did not help. It recommended a deep scan after it found no deleted photos, which requires root, I'm not sure I want to do that.
Can you plug the microsd into a laptop and does it still ask to be formatted? If it reads it okay Recuva is a great windows program but there isn't an android version. Maybe some of the photos can be recovered from the sd. Not sure what to use on the phone itself.
Next time consider using google photos to backup your photos. Anyone gets unlimited high quality free. Also copy and paste and if it works then delete off the phone.
In a windows machine it doesn't ask to format but it can't read the files. I have tried to use Recuva overnight and it still was not done in the morning and it said it would take over a year so I gave up. I am doing this for a friend and don't want to make matters worse for them, but at this point I don't know whether to format it or not and then do the recovery to see if it will do it in a day or less.
I have successfully used this program many times for data recovery:
BadCopy Pro
https://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/
Good luck.
PS: Technically, a "move" file operation between different filesystems is actually a "copy" and "delete". If the former fails and the latter succeeds, there may be nothing to recover. I suggest only to copy between filesystems and manually delete after verifying successful copy.