How To: Recover lost photos

Have you lost the only copies of precious photos and need to get them back? Recovering digital photos from CDs, hard drives memory cards, digital cameras, iPods and other players is one of the most common data recovery tasks. Digital storage media are quite fragile compared to photographic prints, and digital camera users often make just a single copy of their precious pictures before deleting the original. This results in tragedy when the copy is lost or damaged and cannot be read.

If some of your irreplaceable photos seem to be lost: don't be distressed! Unless the medium on which they are stored has been physically damaged, there is a good chance that you can get them back. However, if the images were stored on a rewriteable medium such as a hard disk, CD-RW or memory card, some or all of the image files may have been overwritten. If this is the case, don't write to that disc or memory card any more until all the options for recovering your pictures have been exhausted.

Recommended recovery software

For Windows users:

For Apple Mac users:

There are many different photo recovery tools and general data recovery tools available, and many of them use different techniques to get your photos back. If one product can't recover your pictures, another might be successful. You can eliminate some frustration by trying to pick the best tool for the job first.

Recover photos from hard disk

If you accidentally deleted the photo images from your hard disk:

  1. Check the Recycle Bin.
  2. If they are not in the Recycle Bin then try one of the recovery tools recommended above.

Recover photos from a memory card

If the images you want to recover are on a Flash memory card or in your camera or iPod then they can still be recovered using the same type of recovery software. Photo recovery software accesses a memory card just as if it was a hard drive. If you are using Windows and your digital camera appears in Windows Explorer by the name of the camera rather than as a drive letter, you may need to take the memory card out of the camera and put it in a USB memory card reader before you can start the recovery.

  1. Connect the memory card, camera or player so that it can be accessed like a removable hard drive.
  2. Use one of the recovery tools mentioned above.

Recover photos from CD

You may need to recover photos after you have archived them to CD, and then find that the CD can no longer be read. This can occur when multi-session writing is used to burn batches of images to a disc. Either the CD was written in a form that is unreadable by a new computer or new software, or else the software somehow corrupts the file system making the CD unreadable during the process of adding a batch. It's best to burn a full disc of images at a time.

CDs are written using a different format or file system to that used with memory cards and hard disks, so you cannot use the recovery tools mentioned above in this case. To recover lost photos from CD or DVD media under Windows:

To avoid this problem when creating photo archives on CD in future:

Lost precious photos?

You wouldn't have if you had backed them up with Photos Forever.

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