It’s the worst thing I can imagine happening!! I took a trip to Brazil with a group of friends and took my new Canon camera with me. I got home and hooked it up to my Mac to show my parents, except my young daughter somehow monkeyed with it and deleted all the pictures!!!! Is there any way to recover deleted pictures from the flash card (compact flash, if it matters) of my Canon digital camera?
Deep breath. And another one. Don’t panic.
There are indeed various ways to recover deleted photos or movies from a digital camera’s flash card and even if the card gets corrupted, you can often salvage the majority of its contents before you have to toss it into the circular file (or, better, reformat it and see if it’ll be okay).
Since you’re on a Mac, you can follow along when I did a similar task on my Mac, recovering accidentally deleted photographs and avi quicktime movies from the Sony Memory Stick from a Sony digital camera. Same basic concept, just a different camera and flash card.
First step was to download the terrific application CameraSalvage from the Mac-only development house SubRosaSoft. it’s $50 if you want to buy it but I actually used it in demo mode and that worked fine. It helped us recover over 400 photos and 50 AVI movies from our memory stick…
Start it up and you’ll find it has a unique and quite attractive interface. The first step is to identify the memory card from your camera (you’ll want it hooked up to your Mac and powered up so that the device appears on the Mac desktop):
By default it’ll show you your own hard disk. Probably not what you want. Instead, click on the pop-up menu and find your camera’s card on the list:
Here you can see that /dev/disk3 is the Sony DSC 3.76 GB memory stick, and so that’s what I have selected.
Click on “Explore” and it’ll slowly step through every block of the memory device trying to recover files that are sufficiently intact to be seen by the application:
Eventually it’ll finish up (the 4GB memory stick took about five minutes to scan) and you’ll see a display that gives you a head’s up on what’s been found:
Here you can see that it found 413 JPEG photographs and 21 QuickTime AVI Movies. You can also view individual photos and it’ll even show you a small preview:
At this point there’s a button labeled “Salvage”. Click on it and you’ll then be asked to select a folder within which all the saved photos and movies should be dumped. You can safely choose your Desktop, Documents or Photographs if you’d like: it’ll actually create a subfolder in the specified folder, within which all the recovered files will be stored.
Click “Save” and it’ll start actually recovering the files and copying them onto your hard disk:
This also takes rather a few minutes, but it’s saving stuff, so it’s cool!! 🙂
Eventually you’ll be able to find the recovered photos and movies in the specified folder, as shown here in the Finder:
That’s all ya need. Now you can go through the tedious task of renaming files, but at least you’ve recovered them and don’t need to go back to Brazil for another photo expedition.
If you’re looking for PC software with the equivalent functionality, I suggest you go to Download.com and search for “recovery” or “camera recovery” or similar. You should find at least a half-dozen choices.
Dave,
I am desperate. I need your help! I have a T-Mobile Samsung phone and I had 2 years worth of pictures that my daughter – who has cognitive disabilities – deleted off the flash card. I need your help desperately. Is there any way in the man in the moon that these can be salvaged? PLEASE! I will fly to you, send you my phone, anything you need if I can pay you to do whatever you can! I dare not touch it myself.
Jennifer Sinclair
I can’t help you but call the local computer store – try someone like Best Buy and ask for their support group. They should be able to help. In the meantime *don’t touch the phone*. Leave it powered off and best of luck to you. 🙂
I have a digital Camera finepixA345 and a dell computer. It beeps when I plug in the USB cable but when I go to my computer to transfer the photos unto my computer folder it says that it can not connect. I have tried everything. Can you help.
Well, yes, the fact is sometimes urgent and free won’t come together especially when you just pushed the wrong operation and accidentally wiped out something. There is freeware Mac data rescue out there like Andy indicated, but it is command line tool which most Mac users are not comfortable with. Mac fans have their own style 🙂 (I neve have prejudice against command line tools). As a result, people prefer to take a shot of programs like Dave recommended CameraSalvage, or Wondershare Recovery etc with beautiful GUI interface looks.
One more tip that Dave may have ignored – data recovery is never 100% sure business as there are so many factors influencing recovery results, especially when deleted pictures got overwritten. So the first thing photographers should do is stop using the camera (memory card) to take new photos. So make backups regularly as you know backup is the best way to eliminate panic when any data loss sufferings come. 🙂
Well, there is indeed some freeware data recovery works under Mac OS X which is called TestDisk – 100% free, a cross-platform that has been tested and proven. The only drawback is maybe it works through command line with black screen (DOS) environment.
But for Mac users, GUI software are more preferred as is the style. CamereSalvage is, also this Photo Recovery for Mac:
http://www.wondershare.com/data-recovery-mac/photo-recovery-mac.html
I am right now using on my iMac 10.6 works great to salvage those photos, videos and music files lost from digital camera.
No matter shareware or freeware to choose, showing appreciation for the application developer should be a must as you know thousands of $ and hours and engineers have been put behind the Mac machines. You know, freeware on Mac cannot be compared to that on Windows, nor should it be. However,one day all software will be free! (just personal dream, hah)
Hi, just wanting to know if there is any trick to using camera salvage? I bought the program after i downloaded the trial one and couldn’t save the 380 JPEG files it had said it recovered. So after downloading the full version and saving all my photos, It will not let me open a majority of my photos and the ones it will let me open are all cut up and mixed around. Please help if you can.
Thanks
i accidentally pressed format on my pictures and then i i took 4 more pictures afterwards can i recover my picture from before….its really important i get my pictures back…its my twin boys first christmas. im so mad at myself. Please tell me i can still get them back . my hubby will be so upset with me…oh no!!!
What if I formatted my camera memory card by mistake and then took a few more photos… I had more than 200 photos and took like 25 after I formatted my memory card… Could I retrieve the previous ones? Its urgent please … These are my honeymoon pictures 🙁
Please help!!!
Yay, so glad this was helpful to you, Samm & Gary. Your comment made my day!
dave,
one soy chai latte is not even close enough to the thanks that we need to bestow on you for saving our wretched little asses….
imagine – wedding (best friend), in the panic of the moment “delete all images” option, oops….
camera salvage works…. you do need to purchase the full version but SERIOUSLY…. what’s $50 compared to never getting another job and losing your best friend all in one hit???
cheers
samm and gary in australia
Hi All,
If you don’t want to spend 50 bucks on this, you can try maybe kind less convenient solution: TestDisk. It took CameraSalvage 10 minutes to ‘recover’ deleted files from by bro’s Sony CF. Apparently Salvage found .mov that we were interested in, however it said it is: 200MB JPEG (!) + it wanted to pay in advanced, without any assurance that this 200MB JPEG is what we wanted. Nevertheless… then (knowing that 200MB something is still on CF) I tried TestDisk (open source app, totally free – all systems runnable, though in text mode). It’s sub app PhotoRec was able to recover all my files 2 times faster… Now I can see the MOV my bro deleted accidentally.
So, try out TestDisk first. It is text based, however it has nice menu, you don’t have to type anything, just use arrows and enter! Very nice app.
My problem is not that my pictures have been deleted. Some how the memory card is not being read by my camera or any printer. I took the memory card to CVS to print copies and the worker there told me that my card can not be read due to the slits it has being scratched. And that because they are scratched they dont make contact to be viewed.Is there something or someone that can help???
I just tried a free software called PhotoRec[http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec], it worked awesome! It doesn’t have a fantastic Interface, but it got back to me the photos that had been deleted.
the demo version does not allow me to save pictures, i dont think or even let me preview them.
and does my SD card have to be in the computer or just hooked up in my camera? i have an iMac and there is no slot for my SD card, so the only way i can hook my memory card up is through my camera.
my wife took many pictures with her Canon EOS, at a retirement party. after she was done she accidently hit the “format” button, and seems to have deleted all of the pictures.
Are they recoverable? Kent
Many Thanks for recommending CameraSalvage. It works great.
Thanks for the article/tutorial. I used CameraSalvage to recover images that had “disappeared” on three CF cards shot on a Nikon D200. About 8 gigs of RAW files that our client was needed right away. It worked perfectly. I saw some comments about the demo version not being available and I found that to be the case as well but $40 to recover a huge amount of images perfectly was a very small price to pay to avoid complete disaster.
(Btw I’m not affiliated with the company – just letting people now it worked for me, a lifesaver in fact)
CameraSalvage crashed for me but this one called CardRaider recovered my photos and movies and is only $20.
-Leslie
here is a link:
http://ecamm.com/mac/cardraider
My Sony DSC-T2 camera cannot be used with a Mac. OS X always says the disk needs to be initialized. I have to use it with Windows XP. There is no free PC software that can recover files from this camera. I have tried more than 15 different ones. Any of the software that cost $50 or more can show the photos as thumbnails and then they require payment to save the files.
My friend was looking at something in my camera the other day and she somehow erased all the pictures from my cousins wedding. She swore she didnt delete them or format it.I need help I have a Casio camera.
Agreed, you need to purchase the full version — but I advise you to do so. It works great…and for the amount of pictures you may have lost, I think it’s worth it. Saved my butt!
The CameraSalvage program works well but it does not allow a user to save the recovered photos using the free “lite” demo version. You must pay for the full version to get it to save photos to one’s hard-drive. Dave, you might want to update your information regarding this product. Thanks.
I have “fat fingered” me netscape email page and appear to have deleted some of the columns, doing so i have also deleted my emails and only need to recover emails , not purchase a 45.00 software of everything else that i do not understand, i have tried netscape.com and it directs me to recover deleted email that does not appear on the pages , real moron here , can u help, appears you have a great page to read through and help others, tks larry
how do i click my own picture from my canon a650is?
I downloaded the Camera salvage softwear that you recommended. The problem I came up with is that it didn’t read the scan disk in my camera? DId I miss a step? Does it not work with Canon??
Still trying
I tried this and it did see my photos, but wouldn’t save them to my hard disk (or at all for that matter) without me purchasing the software. Maybe they’ve changed the way the program works? Thought you might want to know so you can update this page.
Thanks.