Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, iphone help, ipod help, AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP help, Mp3 players, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

How do I recover lost digital photographs?

Help! I loaded my digital camera pictures at Wal-Mart to view them and now I can't locate them anywhere and I deleted the pictures already by mistake on the disk. I was hoping I could find them on my hard drive. What would you recommend? Please let me know as soon as possible, I'm sick about it because I had some memorable pictures.

Dave's Answer:

There are some questions submitted to Ask Dave Taylor that I hate to receive, honestly, and this is one of them. As far as I can tell, there's no hope here, no option for you other than to accept that you've lost these pictures, which I'm sure is highly disappointing.

This is really one of the greatest problems with digital photography, in my opinion: there's no simple way to archive your photographs. Even a shoebox of negatives in your closet gives you some chance of retrieving photos down the road, hassles or otherwise. Digital photos, you can - and always should - copy the photos onto your computer hard disk, but then there's a substantial organizational challenge that arises.

Some good tools exist, notably Google's Picasa and Apple's iPhoto programs, but neither of them directly help you with archiving photos as you go along.

So, instead, let me offer you a simple organizational scheme that I use for my photos (and I'm a professional photographer on the side too: Colorado Portraits) and I have gigabytes of pics and have a serious problem if I lose any of them.

In your My Pictures or My Photos folder, create a new folder for each year, then within a given year, download your photos not all at once, but in logical blocks tied to a specific event or location (e.g., "Jan's Birthday Party" or "Yosemite"), prepending the number of the month when the pictures were taken. So if Jan's birthday was in March of 2005, you'd see something like 2005 / 03-Jan's Birthday Party. Easy to manage, yes?

Now, when you want to do backups, you'll find that your photo subfolders are easily organized by date and that you can burn a DVD of all your 2004 pictures, for example, without fuss. It also means that when you want to pull out a picture a few years from now it won't be too hard to accomplish.

Of course, full photo keyword tagging is a better strategy, but personally I don't have time to specifically keyword the hundreds of pictures I copy onto my hard disk after each photo shoot. If you can do that and have the persistence to always do it, more power to you.

In any case, yes, I'm sorry to report that I fear you've lost your photographs.

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Comments

Hi Dave,

Just met you at the Blog Business Summit, and was checking your blogs out, and found I may have something helpful for your digital camera photo recovery question.

I had a similar problem a couple of years ago, and out of sheer desperation, hunted down a piece of software that is an AMAZING help in situations like these. It's called Bad Copy Pro (http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/) and it really does incredible things with deleted/lost media on SD, xD, SmartMedia, MemoryStick, etc. (And no, I don't work for them!)

If the person with the lost photos hasn't written any new data to the camera's memory device, there's a good chance this software can get it back. I believe they have a demo version that you can use to see if the data are recoverable. It's less than $40, and you can buy and download it immediately.

It really helped me out! I hope it can do the same for the person posing the question to you.

Thanks,

Kip Meacham

Posted by: Kip Meacham at August 18, 2005 11:45 PM

About "Digital Recovery" (08-19-05). Huh? I have two digital recovery on my computer now! There are many more out there. The ones I have recover images from hard drive, floppys, and flash drives.

Posted by: Mick at August 19, 2005 6:57 PM

For lost image files, the best on the market is
free. The free software recovers images from most
Storage devices. The file is from Convar called
PC Inspector Smart Recovery. Free for home users, only. I'm sure I found my copy on Google. Works
great even if you have already re-formated, but have not yet recorded new images on you storage
medium. Apollo466

Posted by: David E Clabaugh at August 21, 2005 2:40 AM

I stumbled across these data recovery programs- that may be of use to this fellow & others down the road:

PCI Smart Recovery & PCI FileRecovery

Get them at:

http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Posted by: Tracy at August 22, 2005 4:25 AM

I would recommend that they create a web folder for pictures or any other important documents. That way if their hard drive crashes their documents are safe on the web accessible from any compuer. Most ISP's offer free space and FTP's that are alot faser than before.

Posted by: Larry at August 22, 2005 4:28 AM

"What would you recommend?"

Personally, I make use of "Recover Lost Data" by Stompsoft. (http://www.stompsoft.com/recoverlostdata.html) With this I was able to recover pictures twice now off my hard drive. I will of course reiterate that the sooner you attempt recovery the better. On a side note, this is also beneficial for the future as well, because if you already have the recovery software on your system it will be easier and more likely that you will be able to recover the data that you need.

Posted by: Ginny at August 25, 2006 2:42 PM

I downloaded 242 pictures in Picasa from a digital camera and deleted all but one by mistake how can I recover the photos. Is there a way.
I cannot get access to the camera again.

Posted by: Sandra at May 3, 2007 4:09 PM

Need a help please ? suggest me how can i recover my lost data ?
timi

Posted by: timi at August 22, 2007 12:09 AM

Hi timi, if you can do it yourself then use some good software and try it if it recovers otherwise if you don’t have much idea how to reboot it then go to some good data recovery centre. There is good recovery centre like HDRC I have their website too www.hdrconline.com they will solve your problem. For physical crashes they have some good tools for platter exchange and read write exchange. Find it and do it .I'm sure you'll get your data back for 100%
Cheers!

Posted by: barry at August 22, 2007 12:21 AM

Dave,
There is a service that offers lifetime secure storage and it is guaranteed in writing. We use it to store all of the photos of our wolves at the wolf sanctuary and if I can make a blatant pitch here, for anyone that comes to our website and who wants to support wolf rescue, sanctuary and public education, we will give you 100 high quality wolf photos that you can use to make great wolf photos gifts, or gifts using your own photos and when you do you'll be supporting wolf rescue. We will share our photos using the same platform I make reference to above so your personal photos will always be protected regardless of what happens to your computer. This same service also provides lifetime secure storage for you home videos.

Our website is Www.WildSpiritWolfSanctuary.org.

Posted by: Leyton at January 19, 2008 6:38 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!