Due to a recent post where a member accidentally deleted some photos from a card, I thought I would look into the software he used to recover some of the pictures. This type of software is new to me and I actually had no idea that there was a cost effective solution. Below are the results of my initial run at recovering images as it happened.
CardRecovery by WinRecoveryhttp://www.cardrecovery.com/After downloading and installing the free trial version I plugged in my card reader to a USB port on my PC. I used an old 64 meg SanDisk card with 26 images and one text file. I deleted the text file and 23 images leaving 3 images on the card. I do not remember what was previously on the card so I may be in for a surprise.
After opening the software it runs you through the steps of selecting the drive letter associated with your card. Next it asks for your camera type. I selected Canon, but it does have a “Generic Camera” option. It also asks for a destination folder for your recovered photos.
The next step is to scan. Now I get a pop up window telling me it may not know how large the card is (it showed 54) so I typed 64.
On this small card the scan took only seconds and lo and behold it shows 33 images. Some of the images were shot way back in February of 2007. I wonder what they are?
Moving on to Step 3 it allows you to preview the recovered photos. This part took me a second to figure out, but what it does is shows you 6 images at a time then you click on the next image in the recovered file list and it shows you the next 6 images and so on. It looks like one image may be corrupt. My surprise images were of an eagle, a fawn, and me fishing. There was one image that it couldn’t show a preview of, as it was over 10 megabytes in size. It is most likely a Photoshop .psd file.
After selecting all images to be recovered, I clicked next (Complete) and I got the “Evaluation Limitation” pop up. Without purchasing the key it will not save your recovered images to your hard drive.
Then I got curious as to how many photos would come out and I really wanted to know what the oversized file was…so I purchased the software. The online purchasing process was easy and the code came by email very quickly.
I went through the process again (took only seconds) and when I came to the final step I clicked “Next” to finish the recovery.
This only took a couple seconds. I am sure it might take longer with a larger card.
Once the recovery process finished I clicked on the “Open recovered files folder” button and it opens up the “Recovered” folder with all of the images. Only one was partially corrupt and in reality most of it could be saved with some cropping. The larger file turned out to be a 20 meg JPG image that I believe was a PSD file. I am not sure if this program converted it to JPG or not. One corrupted image from the original 26 that I deleted is not bad and the bonus was the additional photos recovered from earlier sessions.
I also ran the scan using the “Generic Camera” option and still found 33 images. I ran it again with the default 54megs and found all 33.
The small 845 KB size made it a quick download and the $40.00 price was reasonable as well. I say reasonable, as I don’t need it right now so it was a purchase solely to finish this tutorial. With the vast amount of cameras and cards out there I am sure I will know someone that will need recovery help in the future so I figure it was a purchase I might have to make anyways. If I needed it to save images from a trip or of my kids it would definitely be worth the price.
