Here’s a useful idea related to the memory card recovery tutorial we shared yesterday: if you’re ever confronted by someone who forces you to delete your photos (and our magical photographers’ rights gray card doesn’t work), go ahead and delete them! What most people don’t know is that deleted photos can easily be recovered afterward. Even photos on a memory card that’s formatted and completely wiped can usually be restored.

There are, however, a couple things you should keep in mind:

1. Carry Extra Memory Cards

Once you’re asked to delete images, you’ll want to stop using that memory card lest you overwrite them with subsequent photographs. Having extra memory cards with you will allow you to swap out the cards to be recovered later, leaving the deleted areas of the card untouched.

2. Practice Beforehand

Try deleting and recovering your photos beforehand to make sure that everything goes well. Then you can have confidence when deleting your photos that they’re not gone for good. Make sure you know how to use your recovery software successfully (we recommend PhotoRec).

There you have it… a easy solution for getting out of sticky situations when you’re confronted as a photographer while keeping your photographs!

Image credit: Policeman by StartTheDay

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

Do you know what to do if one of your prints gets damaged by water? If you living in a flood prone area (or are clumsy), it’d be good to know.

The Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) has an informative technical bulletin titled “Salvaging Photographs”, that provides a rundown on the response you should take to water damage.

One of the interesting tips is to freeze your prints to prevent further damage:

Freezing to help retard further deterioration by water or mold may be necessary if the materials cannot be treated immediately. Storage at low temperatures buys time in which to safely plan and organize the many steps needed to dry the affected materials and to prepare a rehabilitation site.

Vacuum freeze-drying can help you recover the prints:

In this method, photographic materials—either wet or frozen—are placed in a vacuum chamber. As the vacuum is pulled, a low heat source is introduced and the photographs are carefully dried at temperatures below freezing.

Some additional tips from the document:

• Keep immersion time to an absolute minimum
• Treat least stable items (i.e. prints rather than negatives) first
• Keep identifying information near the prints
• Never let the prints dry in contact with any surface, since it may stick permanently

If there’s any chance you might have to deal with recovering wet prints, this PDF would be a good thing to bookmark, save, or print out.

Salvaging Photographs (via Lifehacker)

Image credit: Flood series by cikaga jamie

When you “delete” a photo from your memory card, it simply goes to that section of storage and marks it as “available” to be used again. The data of the original image is still there on your memory card, though the camera will not display it as an image. Thus, the most important thing you need to remember to do if you accidentally delete data is to stop using the memory card. This is because the only way for the data to truly become unrecoverable is if you delete it, then overwrite it with new data (or even blank data). Thus, to ensure that you can recover your deleted photo, you need to be sure to stop using your card immediately to ensure that nothing is written to that storage location on the card.

To do the actual recovery, you could take the card to a photography place and have a professional recover the data for you, but I’ve always relied on free software that can do the same thing. Here are some popular and free programs to try:

• Recover Files by Undelete & Unerase, Inc.
  Size: 1.16MB
  OS: Windows
• Pandora Recovery by Pandora Corp.
  Size: 3.12MB
  OS: Windows
• Digital Photo Recovery by Art Plus
  Size: 1.29MB
  OS: Windows

Most of the good, safe, and free programs available for recovering photos are available only for Windows users. PhotoRescue is a popular program for Mac users, but costs $29.

Finally, the fact that data is so easily recoverable means that you need to be careful when selling things like computers and memory cards. Simply “deleting” data will not prevent what was on the card to fall into the wrong hands. If you’re selling a memory card that contained data you don’t want others to possibly recover, then be sure to overwrite the card completely, or look online for a program that helps you safely delete data.