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.
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.
Hi Dave, I really like your idea about dating folders for backup etc. But I nearly lost ALL my pictures on my laptop due to a pint of orange juice!
Anyway, I would highly recommend using an online backup service, I use http://www.lushbackup.com and it’s fantastic, all my pictures are safe!
Greg, log into the original iTunes account and/or use the original computer that was used to sync the phone, then plug in the phone and choose “Restore”, then pick the backup from that phone. Good luck.
Hi Dave,
How do i RETRIEVE LOST PHOTS FROM AN IPHONE that was synced under another account and the photos I fear were not backed up, please help
Hi all, i want to add one more helpful tool to recover lost digital images – Zero Assumption Recovery (aka ZAR at http://www.z-a-recovery.com). Although it is a paid software, its demo version allows to recover images, videos for free. Great tool.
Hi. I lost all the Xmas photos I took the other day on my Canon Powershot. I didn’t erase them, just suddenly they were gone and the screen said “No Images”. I downloaded and ran the PCI Smart Recovery program, and it’s run, and it says it’s finished, but I don’t know what to do next! There’s no ‘finish’ option, or ‘view thumbnails’ option or anything. I’ve checked “My Doc” where I specified for the files to go but there’s nothing there except for the program itself.
Can any of you knowledgable people out there help?
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 http://Www.WildSpiritWolfSanctuary.org.
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 http://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!
Need a help please ? suggest me how can i recover my lost data ?
timi
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.
“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.
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.
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
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
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.
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