Ask DLS: Recovering photos from a corrupted flash card

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Ask DLS

Ask DLS: Recovering photos from a corrupted flash card

by Christina Warren Jan 29th 2008

Digital cameras are great, you can store the equivalent of a dozen rolls of film at a time, delete bad shots immediately and download the photos to multiple devices. But like everything else, there can be a dark side (no pun intended) to digital photography: flash card corruption. Many of us have experienced that first hand, where a card that was working normally suddenly appears "empty" or refuses to mount on your system or starts reporting really strange error codes in the camera. If you haven't recently downloaded the photos to your computer, this can make a person positively apoplectic.

And let's not discount user error; say, while taking photos, you accidentally format the card instead of deleting that one shot, wiping out Little Granty's trip to the Apple Store (don't worry, that was just an example, we got the pictures for a future Squadcast) in seconds. Whoops.

Of course, with the right software, more often than not, some or all of those photographs can be recovered from both corrupted and reformatted flash cards. A reader wrote in asking for the best options (he wanted free, we try to balance price with "actually working") and here is a list compiled for various operating systems.

Windows

Unsurprisingly, Windows has the largest selection of recovery tools. If you just want to focus on retrieving files from a flash card, photo CD or thumb drive, here are some options:

BadCopy Pro ($39.95 for single license) - BadCopy Pro can recover data from CD, DVD, Zip disk, floppy disk, flash card and USB flash drive. It can recover information from both formatted disks and disks that are actually corrupted/unbootable. The program is $40 but you can use the trial to see if you can actually recover the files you need before paying for the software. I can personally vouch for the usefulness of this program and have used it on many occasions in my former life as a PC technician. I was once able to successfully recover files from a PhotoCD that was not recognized by either the camera (it was one of those old Sony Mavica's) or Windows.
ZAR: Zero Assumption Recovery ($49.95 for single license, photo recovery tool works unlocked on the demo) - ZAR is aimed at being a multi-purpose file recovery tool, but the reason it's on the list is because the evaluation mode includes full access to the ZAR's digital image recovery tool.
PhotoRescue ($29.95 for either the Wizard or Expert variations) - PhotoRescue has been around a long time and earned a good reputation. Again, this isn't freeware, but you can try the program out to see what it can recover before spending $30.

Mac

PhotoRescue ($29.95 for either Wizard or Expert) - DataRescue makes an OS X version of their software too.
CameraSalvage ($49.99 on CD, $39.99 for download) - SubRosa, the makers of the popular (and useful!) FileSalvage tool for the Mac also makes a digital image specific program. If you are interested in this program (you can try it to see what it recovers before buying), you might just want to buy the full version of File Salvage. It's $40 more but will recover other file types and device types.
CardRaider ($19.99) - CardRaider is a very easy to use app that will recover RAW, JPEG and many movie formats and sends the recovered photos straight to iPhoto. You can demo the program to see what it will recover before buying.

We don't know of any Linux-specific FAT32 recovery applications. If you do - please leave us a comment.

Other stuff to keep in mind

You might not always be able to use software to recover files from your camera. A USB card reader is much more effective. Some cameras will appear as a disk drive, but others require some sort of software interface.
If you accidentally erase a card, do not continue using it if you want to attempt data recovery. You may still be able to recover some photos, but it becomes much more likely that the old files will become overwritten with the new photographs.
If you have a corrupted card and you are able to recover all the data, you might be able to continue using that card, however, be sure to buy a replacement for important events, just in case.

What tools have you used for digital image recovery?

Tags: digital images, DigitalImages, file recovery, FileRecovery, photos, undelete

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

James said 9:01PM on 1-29-2008

I use the freeware tool Digital Photo Recovery 3 from ArtPlus.
http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/dpr.htm
As a bonus, no install is required. Added to my Portable Apps flash drive.

Brian said 9:27PM on 1-29-2008

My wife just had this happen this weekend. We used Card Recovery and it worked great. $40.

Shaun Dewberry said 4:27AM on 1-30-2008

Open source PhotoRec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) worked wonders in recovering about 900 megs of a friends' Croatian holiday snaps. The SD memory card was supposedly unformatted at the time. Brilliant piece of free software.

Jeff said 8:11AM on 1-30-2008

On Linux I've used photorec from the testdisk project with good results. Best of all it is GNU'd and cross platform.

Joel said 8:15AM on 1-30-2008

Some time ago downloadsquad had a post on a free tool called "Recuva" (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/01/20/recuva-files-you-accidentally-deleted/). It is worth looking at.

Bill Minton said 9:29AM on 1-30-2008

I have some tools on http://www.MissingBytes.net that assist w/data recovery from flash drives as well. I've gotten feedback regarding their success on occasion. Note that those tools and everything else there is freeware, no shareware/adware.

murph said 10:46AM on 1-30-2008

another vote for PhotoRec, works like a charm and is FREE. only suckers pay for photo recovery software. :P

James said 12:52PM on 1-30-2008

Take a page from the professionals: when trying to recover files from a fragged hard disk, people will buy/make widgets to make drives read-only to avoid having the OS accidentally hose anything with background processes. If you're recovering from an SD card, slide the write-protect switch as soon as you discover the problem to avoid accidental further corruption.

I second the PhotoRec recommendation -- I think they even make a boot-from-CD version that you can use on busted hard drives as well.

Marshall said 1:40PM on 1-30-2008

For Windows, I have used a little tool called Restoration ( http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html ). It has made me a hero more than once, and didn't cost a thing. It may not do everything these other tools do, but if files get deleted or formatted off a hard drive or flash card, it gets the job done. Very simple interface too.

Eddie said 9:00PM on 1-30-2008

:-( After reading your post, I got new hope for an old Smartmedia card I never touched since Windows couldn't read, but I've kept in the hopes of one day being able to recover the photos from my cruise. Turns out, it was false hope. Nothing could access my poor media card, so I'll keep waiting for some other magic program to come along. Thanks for the info, though.

Matthew said 1:38AM on 1-31-2008

PhotoRec, which is a companion program to TestDisk, is a phenomenal tool for file recovery. It's one of the best file carving tools freely available, and is better than most commercial products I've used. It runs under DOS/Win9x, Windows NT 4/2000/XP/2003, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Sun Solaris, and Mac OS X. You can read more about it here:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

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