When I was faced with the potential loss of a bunch of photos from a concert I attended, I looked into how to recover photos from a formatted or corrupted memory card. Since it was commonly asked question on my favorite photography forum, I decided to do a little write up for future users encountering such a problem. Originally it was to be posted to the forum, but I figured it might be more useful to others if I made it available on my blog instead.

Be it accidental formatting or deleting of images, the recovery process is the same.

First thing you should do right when you’ve realized what’s happened is, DON’T PANIC AND STOP USING YOUR CARD. As long as you don’t use your card after formatting or deleting a picture, there is still hope.

Popular belief is that formatting a card will destroy the data on your card, this is not true. Formatting only destroys the allocation tables which tell the computer/camera/device where the data lives. Deleting a file is similar except that instead of destroying the table, it only deletes the link to the data.

The reason everyone tells you to stop using the card is that anything you do after the fact may overwrite the data you want to save.

(Long metaphor coming up, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know)
Think of your CF card as a piece of paper and you, armed with a pencil, are the camera. As you write onto the piece of paper, you are recording data. And when you erase a word, you are deleting data. What you will also notice is that even though you have erased the pencil, there is still left over markings which may allow you to restore the word. But, if you write something new over that spot, then the chance of you being able to see what’s underneath is pretty low.

So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you’re asking, “How do I restore my precious data!?”

Here’s what you need.
- A Computer with a CF card reader
- Image recovery software
- Your CF Card (duh)

Most computers now have card readers built in or included now but if you don’t have one, then you can stop in at nearly any electronics/computer store and pick up a USB card reader for really cheap.

Image recovery software comes in all kinds of flavors and I’ve only had experience with one so I’ll just provide a list to the more popular recovery programs and let everyone else post a review of their experiences. There are tons more out there and a simple search for “data recovery software” or “image recovery software” should prove to be quite fruitful. I apologize that the following are all Windows programs. I didn’t know of any Mac programs that have been tested by POTN users.

PhotoOne Recovery
http://www.photoone.net/
Cost: $24.95 – Free trial available. (Your first image will be recovered without any watermark but images following that will be.)
Supports: “…images in most popular digital image formats used by digital cameras, including JPEG and TIFF”

Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm
Cost: Freeware – $99 if you wish to recover files other than images
Supports: GIF, JPEG, TIFF, CRW, MOV, WAV, CR2

PC Inspector File Recovery
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm
Cost: Freeware
Supports: ARJ, AVI, BMP, CDR, DOC, DXF, DBF, XLS, EXE, GIF, HLP, HTML, HTM, JPG, LZH, MID, MOV, MP3, PDF, PNG, RTF, TAR, TIF, WAV, ZIP

Once you have your weapon of choice, plug in your card reader, the CF card and let your program do its thing!

Personally, I used Zero Assumption’s Digital Image Recovery when I was forced to format my CF card and recovering my images took just a matter of minutes to go through my 1GB card. I was even able to recover photos from 2 formats back which was pretty neat!

If anyone has anything to add to this, please by all means do so. I decided to write this little HOWTO up since this is a pretty popular topic which comes up quite often and everyone ends up repeating the same advice over and over again.