Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony’s technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I’ve used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open source command-line application that’s bundled with TestDisk, something I’ve successfully used to regain access to inaccessible external hard drives.

In this post I’m going to show you how you can use PhotoRec to recover your photos if you’ve accidentally deleted them or formatted your memory card.

1. Stop Using the Memory Card

In most cases, data that’s “deleted” from a memory card is actually still intact and recoverable. The “deletion” simply marks the space on card as “free” allowing data that’s written in the future to overwrite it. Special recovery programs can still retrieve the deleted data.

Thus, the most important step after you’ve accidentally deleted stuff is to stop using the card. In my case, my pastor had taken about 50 photographs after deleting 500 photos, which meant that at least 50 of the deleted photos were permanently lost.

2. Download PhotoRec

You can download PhotoRec for free for whatever operating system you use here.

3. Use a Card Reader

Plug the card into a card reader so your computer can access it as a storage device or drive.

4. Run the Program

You can double click the program, but if you’re on Linux or a Mac you might need to run the program with root privileges (using sudo) to see the complete list of drives. See this page for more help on running the program.

5. Step Through the Screens

PhotoRec is pretty straightforward. Make your selections for each step for things such as disk to recover, partition type, destination to save recovered files to, etc… In most cases the correct option will be pre-selected for you. Since nothing will be changed or written on the memory card, you can always just try out the default selections and see if they work (they likely will). For a visual step-by-step guide for the different options, check out this page on the PhotoRec wiki.

6. Watch as Your Photos Are Extracted

Using PhotoRec, I was able to recover all 450 of the photographs that weren’t overwritten by new images from the 512 megabyte Memory Stick card in about 4 minutes. The program can be used for normal hard drives and non-photo files as well.

There you have it — the story of how I saved someone $300 and 450 memories. If you ever accidentally delete photos or format your memory card, think back to this post and try using PhotoRec to undo your disaster.

Image credit: MS Pro Readable – IMGP1973 by yuankuei, card reader_1635-37-3 by mondays child

Notice how the background color of the gallery isn’t fixed, but instead depends on the dominant color in the particular photograph being displayed. Now, you could use the colors extracted from photographs for a variety of purposes depending on your level of expertise and the purposes you have in mind.

In this post I’ll briefly cover a few ways you can extract useful web colors from your photos.

The Color extract PHP Class

Difficulty: Hard

If web development is you’re thing, and you’re comfortable with PHP, there’s a great PHP class over at phpclasses.org that you can download called Color extract.

Download it, upload it to your web server, include the class in your PHP file, and it can turn an image file path that you give it into an array of the most dominant color tones that appear in your photograph.

You can then use these color tones however you’d like. In the examples above, I simply took the most dominant color tone, as determined by Color extract, and used it as the background color for each page.

Though this is one of the more difficult ways to extract colors from your photographs, you can use it to make your web pages dynamic, automatically setting the background colors based on the colors in your photographs.

Similar classes or functions probably exist for your scripting/programming language of choice. Just do a Google search to find them!

Manual Extraction

Difficulty: Medium

A second way you can extract web (hex) colors from your photos is by eyeballing it and doing it manually. If you have Photoshop, you can use the eyedropper tool to select a color, and then open up the color picker to view the hex color code of that color.

Most image editing programs should have a way for you to view the hex color of selected colors. Another option for manual extraction is to use a lightweight program designed specifically for extracting colors. Do a quick search on download.com for “color picker“, and you’ll find what you need for your operating system.

The downside to this method is that it might be more difficult to find a suitable color that works well, since colors can differ greatly from pixel to pixel. On the other hand it gives you a much greater degree of flexibility in choosing the color you’d like, since automated methods often fail when the color distribution in photographs is abnormal/non-uniform.

ColorSuckr

Difficulty: Easy

Finally, there’s quite a few web services that are more than happy to do all the work for you. ColorSuckr is one such service. All you need to do is enter the URL of the image you’d like suckr the colors from, and the service will return the hex color codes of the dominant colors.

If you extract web colors from your photographs in ways I didn’t mention in this article, please share it with us in the comments!