by John Mariana
As our camera memory cards grow old and depending on how much we use them they will go bad. I’ve been shooting and then try to down load the images and find that the card is corrupted. So then what? There is software you can purchase to recover the images. The images are still on the card but the directory is corrupted.
Cards are the least expensive part of our photography so if you shoot a lot I recommend throwing away cards and buying new ones from time to time depending on how often you use them. I get new cards at least 1 1/2 years. Seems like a long time but I also have 10 cards and rotate them in use.
Here is Tim Grey’s suggestion.
Tim Gray
Question : I recently took a CompactFlash (CF) card out of my camera, inserted it in a card reader and got a shock when all my shots had disappeared. I suspect the CF card may have lost the file allocation table. Is there specific software you would suggest for trying to recover the pictures that were on the card before I pulled it out of my camera?
Answer: I highly recommend PhotoRescue from DataRescue for recovering images on digital media cards (and other storage devices). You can download a free trial that enables you to see exactly what images can be recovered, and then purchase a license to actually recover the images. You can find the trial download on the DataRescue website here:
http://datarescue.com/photorescue/
It is worth keeping in mind that in most cases when you delete photos or even format a digital media card, the photos can still be recovered as long as you haven’t written new images over the space on the storage device where the photos are located.
PhotoRescue is offered in both a “Wizard” and “Expert” version. For most users I recommend the “Wizard” version as being the easiest to use.