Restore Deleted Digital Camera Files
When dealing with the vast amounts of pictures you can now take with a digital camera, chances are good that the ratio of bad pictures to ones you want to keep is pretty high. So when deleting the unwanted pictures from your memory card, what happens when you delete one of the good ones? Fret not. Luckily, you can easily get them back with a few simple steps.
Instructions
Setting Up
1. Determine if you are taking pictures directly to your camera or to a SD memory card, of it the photo was saved on your computer's hard drive. If you have inserted a SD memory card into the camera, it is likely that you are saving pictures to it. If you have not, you are saving pictures directly onto the camera's hard drive. If you were viewing the photo on your computer, it's possible it was on your computer's hard drive.
2. Do not take any more pictures, either on the memory card or the camera. Once it's been decided that a digital image was deleted erroneously from your memory card or camera, and you want to get it back, this is the most important thing.
3. Eject the memory card from the camera and set it aside (if it is indeed being used). If you happen to take more pictures on the card or the hard drive of the camera after you've deleted the wanted image, chances are the file has been overwritten and is unrecoverable. Make sure the card is in a safe place until it is needed in further steps.
4. Download onto your computer any of a number of free software recovery programs. This includes PC Inspector Smart Recovery.
5. Connect your camera to your computer through a direct cable connection (USB port), if you want to recover the images from your memory card, insert the card into the camera or use a card reader (often built in to newer computers). Make sure that the memory card/camera shows up as a new drive letter under your "my computer" settings. If it doesn't, chances are you will have to use the computer's memory card reader.
Running PC Inspector Smart Recovery
6. Double-click on the PC Inspector icon on your desktop to start it running.
7. Use the drop-down menu in the left-hand box, titled "Select Device," to choose the new drive that your camera is located in. If you are simply connecting the camera, the files will still be located there, if you are restoring files from a memory card, they will be read either through your camera automatically, or through the card reader.
8. Choose JPG from the drop-down menu in the second, middle box, titled "Select Format Type," as most cameras take pictures in this format. If, by chance, after the following scan, the deleted file didn't show up, it is possible the camera saves the images in a different format; research your camera and redo this step accordingly.
9. Select the destination where you'd like to save your recovered images to in the right-hand box, titled "Select Destination."
10. Click the start button in the lower right hand side of the program window. The resulting action may take a while depending on how much information and digital images where saved on the card or camera, but after the program has finished, the original deleted image should be recovered and saved in your chosen destination drive.
Tags: memory card, your computer, your camera, card camera, hard drive, card reader