How To Undelete Pictures On Your Camera

It’s inevitable. Sooner or later, pictures taken on your digital camera succumb to Murphy’s Law. You may be in the process of transferring pictures from the memory card, or perhaps just getting ready to show them off, when POOF! They’re gone.

Lost forever, in the digital abyss. Or are they? Maybe not. Here’s how to find out.

As long as you haven’t used the camera after the pictures were deleted, there’s a pretty high probability that you can get them back. If you’ve deleted a picture or several pictures — whether by accidentally hitting the “delete” key on the camera, by copying them to your PC and having the PC delete them as they were copied, or by any of a hundred other goofball methods — you must start by DOING NOTHING.

DON’T take any more pictures with the camera. DON’T try to use the camera’s built-in menu. DON’T reformat the memory card. If you’ve removed the memory card, DON’T put it back into the camera.

What really happens when you delete pictures.

Much like an older computer, when you delete a picture on a camera, you don’t actually delete the picture. Most cameras use a dated file-handling system known as FAT (short for File Allocation Table). The FAT system used in cameras is very similar to the FAT system used in PCs back in the MS-DOS era. FAT basically separates the available memory into spaces like drawers in a dresser. When you take a digital photograph, the camera stores the image in enough unused “drawers” to hold the picture file.

When you delete a picture, the file isn’t erased. Instead, the area that the file occupied, the “drawer”, is marked as
“unused” and becomes available to hold a new picture. However, the file itself stays intact until the camera needs the room to store another picture. That’s why you shouldn’t use the memory card that holds your deleted images until you’ve restored them.

A Free Tool

Before you spend your money on an expensive tool, or worse - “junk” program full of spyware - try PC Inspector Smart Recover from Convar, a German Software developer.

The program works almost every time, although I did hit snags installing it on one specific Vista computer. You can download the program at http://www.snapfiles.com/get/smartrecovery.html (If you need step-by-step instructions for this program, send a blank email to camerahelp@the- tech-reporter.com)

If PC Inspector can’t restore your pictures, head over to the RescuePro site and shell out $40 for a copy of the program. It’s at http://www.lc-tech.com/software/rprowindetail.html

If you’re in the market for a Flash memory card, SanDisk gives away the software, free. For example, spend $35 for a SanDisk Extreme III 1 GB flash memory card that includes RescuePro on a CD. Save five bucks and get more memory. Nice.

About the Author:
Ken Ivey is a veteran technology addict, consultant, author, web designer, and President of MidTN Technology, a marketing and web design firm. His website is www.The-Tech-Reporter.com