Digital cameras are fantastic. I remember the days of film 110 and 34mm cameras. Where you were so careful about the photograph being taken. Sometimes you would take an extra shot, in case the first one did not come out correctly. The loading and unloading was always a pain for me, because of the fear of exposing the film to light and losing it all. Then there was the development process. Putting the final print of you pictures into the hands of what you hope is a qualified developer.
With Digital cameras nowadays, all those fears and worries have gone. You can take as many pictures as you like. Instantly preview them. Delete the ones you don’t like. Take more.
But Digital cameras bring about a whole new set of fears. One of them is deleting or losing your precious images. For whatever reason, I am sure we have all found ourselves in the situation of having to recover some deleted image. But the question is how do we do that?
Well the answer is pretty simple. Remember that a digital image is just a file on a disk. Be that a flash drive, compact disk or memory stick. If you can get to the disk and view it as a file system, you could probably recover the deleted image. Provided you have not overwritten the space where the image was held with other images.
Recovery Tools
There are a whole lot of software tools out there that can help in this regard. Just do a Google search. But the one that I like and am using at the moment is ZAR or Zero Assumption Recovery. They used to have a free separate image recovery module, but now that is incorporated in it’s flagship product. Although the product is a paid for product, the image recovery portion of it is still free. So downloading the trial version will still give you the ability to recover mages. Go to Zero Assumption Recovery
Current version (ZAR 8.4) supports digital photo recovery for the following file formats:
- GIF
- JPEG
- TIFF
- CRW - Canon RAW data
- MOV, AVI movie
- WAV - Waveform audio
- CR2 - Canon CR2 RAW format (see notes below).
- ORF - Olympus RAW format
The ZAR tool also has the ability to recover other types of data. Check out their website for more information.
Another Good image recovery is MJM Image Recovery
For a list of other freeware data recovery tools that include recovery from NTFS and Fat HD volumes go to the data recovery section of Snapfiles found here.
Happy shooting.
Do you have a favourite image recovery tool that you use? If so please let us know in the comment box below.