Recover deleted photos from your digital camera’s memory card

I accidentally deleted the photos that were stored on my digital camera’s memory card before I got a chance to import them. Is there any way to get them back?

There is a chance that you will be able to get back some or all of your digital photos. First things first: DO NOT take any more pictures with the memory card that you want to recover photos from. If you are away from home and will be recovering your photos at a later date, remove the memory card from your camera and put it in a safe place. If you take any more photos or save any data to your memory card, you may quite possibly ruin your chances of photo recovery.

Quick Internet searches will reveal a tremendous number of programs that advertise lost data recovery, and most of them cost between $25 - $40. Luckily for you though, the folks at CONVAR have a program called PC Inspector Smart Recovery that does the very same job for free. The procedure for recovering your photos is:

1. Download and install PC Inspector Smart Recovery.
2. With the memory card inserted, connect your digital camera to your computer. Under “My Computer”, note the drive letter assigned to your camera’s memory card (usually E: or F:).
3. Start PC Inspector Smart Recover and when it loads, set up your data recovery by:
1. Selecting the drive letter to recover files from.
2. Selecting a folder on your computer where the recovered files are to be saved.
4. Now, click the “Start” button and let PC Inspector Smarty Recovery work its magic.
5. Browse to the folder that you selected for your recovered files and check out the results of the recovery.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery may take a long time to process depending on the size of the memory card you’re scanning, but the results are worth the wait. We were able to resurrect 100% of the photos that were accidentally deleted from a 1 GB memory card, and the reviews on Smart Recovery’s website are a testament to similar results in many other like situations.