Luckily, there are many software applications that can help you
recover your lost digital photos. Pictures can be recovered because
when a photo is deleted from a memory card, the link to the photo is
removed, but not the actual data. You can think of it this way: you go
to a library and look up a book in the database, but don’t find
any information. Maybe the book was new and had not been put into their
online system yet, but the physical book is still in the library, you
just can’t find it easily.
Photo recovery programs because ignore the link and read all the
books in the library and just spit them back out for you. They usually
work very well unless some serious damage has been done to your card.
One program that I have used, which does an excellent job and is
totally free, is
ArtPlus Digital Photo Recovery.
The program is only 1MB in size and doesn’t even have to be
installed on your computer, it just a single executable file. To
recover your photos, first connect the camera to your computer or use a
card reader. Download the program and run it.
Go ahead and click
Run Digital Photo Recovery at the top. Click Next and choose the drive for your memory card:
Next choose the target folder where you want to save the recovered photos:
Finally, go ahead and click
Start to
begin the process. Depending on the size of your memory card and your
computer’s speed, the process can be anywhere from a few minutes
to several hours. Either way, I’m sure the waiting time will be
worth it!
I’ve tested the program by simply deleting all the photos off
of my memory card (of course I saved them first) and running the
program to see what it could recover. I was quite impressed with how
well it worked! I was able to get back more than 90% of my photos. The
other 10% were a little messed up and some were just empty files, but
most came out perfect! Give it a shot and hopefully it works!