Photo Recovery
As you can see below, I’ve been on my annual hunt to find butterflies to photograph. In the last batch, I grabbed a media card and went off photographing. The day prior, however, was my mom’s birthday. A couple siblings, my husband, and I took mom out for dinner and then a small party at her home. I took some pictures of mom blowing out her candles, and so on. What does that have to do with my butterfly pictures, you wonder? It was the card with mom’s pictures that I inadvertently grabbed, and I reformatted that card before I took the party pictures off! Oh boy. I’d never hear the end of this one!
Then my brain kicked in. I remembered that a couple of MacWorlds ago, I bought a photo recovery program called “Picture Rescure, Digital Picture Recovery,” by Prosoft Engineering, Inc. I installed the program (yes, I bought it a couple of years ago and haven’t installed it until now). I inserted my media card. A screen appeared showing the card. I clicked the start button. Slowly the bar along the bottom started making its way from one side to the other. As it did, a grid started filling with thumbnail images. And, there they were: the photos of mom! Wow. It worked! I only had to select those images and click a recover button.
My partner informed me that of course it would work, that reformatting doesn’t actually erase the card but instead resets the directory information. Since I didn’t fill the card with mom’s images, and since I didn’t fill the card with butterfly pictures (something I would have done had there been more to photograph), the images of mom were still there. In theory it all sounds fine, but seeing the reality of it actually working was great.
Lesson learned: If you reformat your media card and then realize that you didn’t yet get photos off of it, stop using the card. Then do a search on “photo recovery software.” While the program I used is no longer being sold, Prosoft is selling a new program called Klix (which I suspect is even better than what I was using). Hopefully you’ll never need such a program. But at $30, it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind when photos are inadvertently deleted. It works with both Mac and PC platforms. http://www.joesoft.com/products/klix.php.