Digital Home Thoughts: Recover Lost Digital Photos with PhotoOne Recovery

Woe Is Me!
A good friend of mine recently bought a digital camera before going away on his holiday. He'd had the camera for a few weeks beforehand so was reasonably familiar with the controls. Upon his return, I was eager to find out how he had got on. Apart from the fact that there had been torrential rain and the hotel had flooded, he had also managed to accidentally reformat one of his two memory cards, losing almost fifty photos in the process.

As we were talking about what had happened, he recounted how the camera didn't take too long to format the card. We mused that perhaps the formatting process didn't actually wipe the card but merely initialised the directory information. Therefore, it might be possible to recover the otherwise-lost photos.

A quick Google search for digital photo recovery turned up some dedicated service companies (send them the card, they send back the photos) plus a wealth of choice of software to allow you to do it yourself. On the basis that none of the software appeared to alter the card contents, I agreed to try to recover the photos first and if I failed, we'd send the card away.

How The Products Work
Most digital cameras, when connected to a computer, appear as a disc drive to the operating system. This is particularly true if the memory card from the camera is slotted into a card reader or, if a Compact Flash card, into a PC carrier card and a PCMCIA slot on a laptop.

Almost without exception, the content of memory cards is structured according to the FAT format. The memory card is divided into sectors just like on a disc. As hinted at above, when a memory card is formatted, the formatting process typically doesn't wipe out every part of the memory card. Instead, a top-level or root directory is created in the correct sectors of the memory card so that the camera and the computer know where to find the photos when they are created.

What the recovery tools do, therefore, is scan the sectors of the memory card, looking at the data contained in those sectors to decide if the data is a directory or a recognisable image format.

In practice, there is some variance in the quality and effectiveness of the do-it-yourself tools. All of the tools I discovered through Google were downloadable as a trial version. Typically, this allows you to scan the problematic card to see how effective the tool would be before paying for the software. What was interesting was that the number of photos found varied product by product!

Most, but not all, of the tools displayed thumbnails of the images found. If you are looking to find a similar tool for yourself, I would strongly recommend staying away from any software that doesn't show you any sort of image, otherwise how do you know what has been recovered?

The PhotoOne Recovery Difference
Even with the thumbnails, though, you can't be entirely sure that the image has been found completely. Where PhotoOne Recovery differs from the other half-dozen that I tried is that even in trial mode, it will save all of the images it finds. The first image is saved with the original image quality without a watermark. All other images are saved with a text watermark and higher compression.

The software is very easy to use. After installing it and double-clicking on the desktop icon, you are given three choices, as shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1: PhotoOne Recovery Tasks.

Create a Disk Image allows you to scan a memory card and preserve the sectors into a file. This is very useful if you think the problem is being caused by a faulty memory card and that repeated use of the card might make it worse. The software copies all of the data from the memory card into a file. You can then put the card away and work on the image file itself.

Recovery from a Disk Drive and Recovery from a Disk Image do the same job – just using different sources. Figure 2 shows the user interface for recovering from a removable drive. Recovery from a disk image lets you browse for a previously-created image file and then moves on to the next step.


Figure 2: Selecting a memory card for recovery.

Recovery from either source is swift and, more importantly, automatic. Some of the tools I looked at offered advanced options such as the cluster size. However, unless you really understand what difference that makes, having that option isn't going to help you.

As the software scans for images, it displays thumbnails of the photos that have been found, as shown in Figure 3.


Figure 3: Discovered photos.

You can double-click on a thumbnail to see the image full-size. As you can see from Figure 4, if you haven't registered the software, the watermark is displayed in the enlarged photo :-). Clicking on the i icon is supposed to give you image property information. However, I couldn't get this to work for me. The image attribute information seemed to be taken from the thumbnail instead of the original file and the meta data was blank, instead of giving you the sort of information you can normally get from a JPEG such as camera used, parameters, etc. This is a relatively minor bug.


Figure 4: An enlarged image.

The final step available to you is to save all or some of the images. You can either click on the Save All button or tick the checkboxes next to the images you want and then click on the Save button. It needs to be understood that because a formatted card has had the directory information wiped, the original filenames can't be used. You therefore have to supply the prefix for the filenames and PhotoOne Recovery then appends an index number.