Digital Home Thoughts: Recover Lost Digital Photos with PhotoOne Recovery

Putting The Software To Use
When presented with my friend's memory card, the software found 41 images, all of which looked good in thumbnail mode. However, when I saved them out, one of them didn't have the full image displayed – most of the image area was grey. Still, 40 out of 41 images was a lot better than none, so I paid for the software, got the registration key, entered it and then saved the images again.

Unfortunately, the faulty image still didn't look any better, but the other 40 images were recovered with their full resolution glory. That particular memory card came from a Canon camera and was read in a PC card carrier. I also tried the software out on a Memory Stick actually present in my Sony U-60 connected via USB and it worked a treat, finding images that I had previously deleted from the card.

The one niggle I have got is that if you are using Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional, you will need to have administrator rights in order to read the memory card. The software displays a rather unhelpful error message if you don't have administrator rights, as you can see in Figure 5. This, unfortunately, is a pet peeve of mine. I wish more software would either run under normal user rights or would handle the problem better. Thankfully for me, I'm used to hitting these sorts of problems and knew to try as an administrator next. The less-accustomed user might think that his or her card was completely dead.


Figure 5: Where does it say I need administrator rights?

Conclusions
It is a fact of life that people are going to accidentally format their memory cards, or the memory cards are going to fail. If that happens to you, you could do worse that try PhotoOne Recovery. It won't cost you anything to try it and it will give you a pretty good idea of what you are going to recover if you stump up the cash.

The tool is very easy to use and the user interface is very clear with instructions of what to do at each step. The Help file is almost redundant!

Oh, and it really was a friend and not me who formatted the card :-).