Pictures recovery from Flash Memory card.

Do you use a digital camera? It would be highly unlikely that you don't, especially with the rapid dropping prices of a digital camera. I remember buying my first digital camera in 2001, for a 3MB digital camera it cost me around US$700!! I just saw one listed this week for about $130 with 7MB. You can even get a cheap one for around $50 (on special). So digital cameras are here to replace the traditional ones.

Now if you do use the digital camera, you may or may not encounter the problem of corrupted data on your memory card for one reason or another. If you have never encountered this, good for you but read on anyhow, for who knows when you might be need this one day. In the past I have helped a friend with such a problem. He had his Europe vacation photos in that memory card and for some reason he was unable to access them. He gets some kind of card error trying to read his card. Imagine the agony he went through thinking all those vacation memories went up in smoke. Just today I encountered this problem too. While my camera was writing the data back to the memory card, for some reason it just stopped and refused to continue. I couldn't do anything with it except to turn off the camera. And the inevitable thing happened, my memory card got corrupted and when I turned it on again, it said that the card was unformatted. Even though my pictures are not as valuable as my friend's vacation pictures, still I was sore about it. (By the way, I did recover my friend's photos successfully and he was so grateful to me for that.) I remembered vaguely the software I used to recover my friend's photos (more than 2 years ago) and I did a Google search and found it. I tried that software, which has since been updated to a later version. And I am glad to say that I managed to recover all my photos successfully. This software is called the PC Inspector Smart Recovery by Convar. You can download it from this site .

This is a freeware program. Pretty straight forward to use. You first select the Device, then the Format type and finally the Destination where you want the recovered files to be stored. And you just click the Start button. That's all to it. It worked well for me to recover my pictures but I didn't have much luck recovering the .MOV movie files for some reason. It is supposed to be able to recover the files even if the card has been reformatted. I tried this after reformatting my Memory card with my camera but again didn't have much luck with this either. It wasn't able to find any of the files I previous found in the same card prior to reformatting. Nevertheless I still think it is nifty program to have around for moments like this, to salvage those precious memories in your memory card.