Recovering lost images from a memory card
The biggest ‘Oh… Shit’ feeling I’ve ever had on a photo job was when I had a rush-job: Press deadline was at 5pm, and I had to photograph an event at 3pm. The event was meant to last until 4pm, which would give me half an hour journey time back to the office, half an hour of Photoshopping… Tight, but doable. Then the worst thing imaginable happened: The event was delayed in starting, and my time was ticking away.
When I finally got in the taxi on my way back, I decided to clean out all the photos I knew I wasn’t going to use from the memory card, using the camera itself, so I could spend less time downloading and sorting, and more time just fixing it, so we could drop in the images and get the magazine to print.
I selected a batch of photos. “keep that one, lose that one, keep, keep, lose, keep, that’ll do, Format. Yes, of course I want to format. Yes. Confirm.”. I sat back in the cab, mentally going through what I had to do when I made it back to the office. Then it suddenly hit me.. ‘Format?’ Shit! No! Surely not… NOOOO!!!!
Here’s what to do if you are as big a plum as I am…
The first rule of data recovery
If you fear something Bad might have happened, take your memory card out of the camera immediately, and stop using it.
It has happened many of us: that ‘oh, no…’ feeling that occurs when you realise that you have just lost your pictures on your memory card. The good thing is that all is not lost and there are some ways to get that data back. We are going on a mission called ’saving our asses’ and here is what we will need to make this a successful mission.
Once you have lost data on a memory card you need to quarantine that card and stop using it immediately.
I know I wrote that in bold, but let’s repeat it, because it’s the single most important thing you’ll learn from this article:
If you lose data on a memory card, take it out of your camera, and do not use it for anything else.
You may have to exhaust different options with that card to try to recover those photos so don’t keep adding pictures to it. Continuing to use the card can be detrimental to you actually recovering those photos.
How are images deleted from a card?
Image deletion operations – and, indeed, formatting a card – is normally not what most people think of as ‘proper’ deletion. Instead, you’re merely re-setting the file allocation table. Imagine your memory card as a chest of drawers which has 20 drawers, and can hold 20 photographs. When you take a photo, it’s put into one of the drawers, and you stick a little lable, like IMG_1234.RAW on the front of the drawer. It’s safe there. When you need it, you open the drawer, and you take the picture out.
When you delete a photo, something interesting happens: The photo isn’t removed from the drawer, all your camera does, is to peel the label off the front of the drawer. That means that this drawer is now ‘free space’, so if you had a full set of drawers, and ‘delete’ three photos, you now have 17 full drawers, and three ‘empty’ ones. When you take a new photo, your camera puts the photo into one of the free drawers, on top of the old photo.
Your old photo doesn’t disappear off the memory card until a new photo is put on top of the old one. Even if your card reads ‘empty’, all the old photos are still there, just not easily accessible.
Recovering data from your memory card
I was half-way around the world (Well, 1,400 miles into my motorbike tour of Europe) when I took this photo - while the picture itself isn't that unique, it represents a fond memory for me - I'd be gutted if I had lost it, but I was able to recover it off my memory card. Phew.
Lost data recovery operations happen with some type of third party software, in fact this is probably the method you are going to use to retrieve your data. There is a problem though, which software option should you purchase?
There are literally hundreds of options to choose from in this area, both paid and free choices. It would be close to impossible to tell you exactly which one is the best for you, because the focus of the programs can vary. Depending on how you lost your photos that could determine which product will be best suited to solve your problem. However before you go out and purchase a product make sure you take these steps:
Try a demo version first – Many programs (like the very popular Photo Rescue, which is available for both Mac and Windows) will allow you to use a trial version before you have to purchase a full version. It is strongly recommended that you test the trial version with your camera and with your specific problem: For these types of software, the trial software will usually show you which images could be recovered with the full version of the software.
Leaving it to the professionals
Some photos are less valuable than others - but if yours are a matter of life and death (say, you lost someone's wedding photos), then get professionals involved!
Professional data recovery is many orders of magnitude more expensive than doing it yourself, but it’s incredible what can be recovered…
And if your photos are truly invaluable (losing the photos as a wedding photographer, for example, could prove hideously expensive if you get sued by the couple as a result… Which has been known to happen, and this is why there is separate wedding photography insurance out there), you might have to find a local professional service (try googling for it).
If you have to go down this route, go to the corner shop and buy some beans and toast off the internet, because if you have to get someone to manually pick the card apart and read the chips inside your card directly, you’d not going to be able to afford to eat anything else anytime soon – I once helped someone find a data recovery service, and they paid over £3,500 to get a dead hard-drive resuscitated for long enough to copy it over to a fresh drive. On that note – when did you last back-up your photos?
My day job, if it can be called that, is being a writer. I've got one book out there so far and it's awesome, so go ahead and buy a copy! It's available from 
In front of you, five hyperactive men with guitars, drums, and microphones. Behind you, five thousand fans. In your hands, a camera... You're going to need more than just a little bit of good luck to pull this one off. That's where this book comes in.
Take a Canon EOS 450D. Attach a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. Hit the streets of London. See what happens.
Insights, suggestions and comments
No need to pay for this type of software. The open source community has you covered. Plus there’s less risk of getting malware and viruses when the source code is open for all to see.
Here’s a link to an open source, free, stable, and easy to use data recovery tool:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Thanks for the lesson about data recovery. I had no idea how deletion works, and it’s good to know because I recently had a card go on the fritz.
Having worked as a IT admin for years, and now as a pro photographer (I know, but I really do have one of my degrees in photography). Anyway, I can say, that most information is very recoverable. Most of what a pro can do, any one can do. The tool that was recommended is fine and all, but I would recommend Recuva. It’s awesome and looks in a very detailed way at the bits and bytes on the card.
This being said. Recovery percentages average about 60%. And if the damages is physical, well, you can just throw it out in the trash.
As as a rule of thumb I use two guidelines. I spread my pictures across multiple cards. I switch about ever 30 frames or so. I rotate through about 10 small cards every day. That way, I never lose blocks of the day, just smaller portions throughout the day. This also saves money, because it is generally cheaper per gig to buy several smaller cards. I know, it sounds like work, but hey, we changed film.
The second rule is to toss cards after a set amount of time. Generally, bad things happen to older cards. I know, it seems like a waste of money, but technology does wear out with use. Heat damages circuitry, and the storage medium can only be switched between a 1 and 0 so many times. I always tell my friends to get a new computer every 3 years. Most of them don’t listen to me, and invariably I spend a weekend building them a new computer and trying to recover the data that was lost when it crashed. I, usually, keep a card in my work rotation about 6 months. When you think about it, it’s so cheap now that buying new cards every 6 months isn’t bad. Now, this will vary depending on usage levels. I do about 3-4 weddings a week, and use all to half the cards depending on the requirements, and my trigger happiness.
I always repeat this, to everyone, and hour of prevention and a 100$ is worth the three days of labor and the 500$ for a good data recover, oh and the lose of business from word of mouth, etc…
Be careful using recovery tools under OS X — as soon as you plug in a device that is seen as an external drive (i.e. a memory card, USB stick, phone, …) Spotlight will try to create some of it’s files and directories on it (Finder will also do this if you delete any files)
These file can permanently overwrite the information needed to recover lost files — not just the directory entries but the raw data itself
Although you can tell Spotlight not to index a device, you can only do so after it is plugged in and that preference is forgotten as soon as you unplug it — therefore, it is safer to always use a PC for recovery if you can
You can pre-create empty files with the names that Spotlight/Finder use on a card (.Trashes, .fseventsd, .Spotlight-V100, …) to stop them overwriting data BUT you need to do this everytime you format the card and before you write pictures to it — so this isn’t as useful in practice as it could be
Windows also has some indexing tools, so remember to turn those off before you plug it in. Also, if you really want to keep the data safe, use a bootable copy of linux for file recovery. There are several out there.
As a purely film shooter, I always have a concrete backup (but that’s not to say I don’t have other issues that might result in loss of images to contend with!).
However, my wife has a PnS and I’ve had to use REST2514 more than once to recover photos. It’s free and it hasn’t failed me yet.
@Stephen – The difference is that the Windows doesn’t index removable devices by default and, even when it does, the tools never write to the device they are indexing (the indexes are held under your AppData folder on your hard disk)
It doesn’t matter what the OS is (I use Windows, OS and Linux daily so I don’t have a perference) — the point is that you must never let anything write to the device if you want to guarantee that you can recover the data from it
Fortunately I haven’t formatted my SD card yet and lost any images but its a handy thing to know and I wasn’t aware how the erase process went. I had assumed like most people formatted means gone forever.
Share your wisdom