Step-by-Step Guide for Recovering Deleted NEF Photo for Mac

A while ago I trashed a folder of raw files (.nef) from my Nikon D1x only to discover that they were missing a couple of days ago (not happy!). After some testing and internet searching I came up with a solution that may be useful to someone else in the future so there may be no need for panic. If this does not work then the need for panic may arise.

When you delete NEF photos from your MacBook, the photo itself isn't deleted, just the index entry that says where the data for those files is located. The space containing the deleted photos is also now marked as free space so it is available to the system for any new files to be written there instead. So it is very, very important to not take any more pictures to hard disk or memory card from which you want to get back deleted NEF photos for Mac.

Mac NEF Photo recovery tool can be not cheap because technicians may need to disassemble your hard drive to fix the problem. Hard drive data recovery is usually done in a 'clean room' as hard drives are sealed to avoid errors caused by dust or other particles. Also hard drives are finely tuned machinery and it takes specialist equipment to read the platters from a physically damaged drive. So you can use Mac NEF Photo recovery tool to recover deleted NEF photo for Mac.

When you delete NEF photos from your MacBook, the NEF photo itself isn't deleted, just the index entry that says where the data for those files is located. The space containing the deleted photos is also now marked as free space so it is available to the system for any new files to be written there instead. So it is very, very important to not take any more pictures to the MacBook from which you want to get back deleted NEF photos for mac. OK, now you can read the following guide to recover deleted NEF photos on Mac.

Mac NEF Photo recovery tool recovers lost and deleted digital photos, music, and video files on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and above. It supports both Intel and PowerPC based Macintosh and is an Apple Universal application supporting recovery from IDE / ATA / SATA / SCSI hard disk drives, SD Cards, CF Cards, XD Cards, Memory Sticks, external Zip drives, FireWire and USB hard drives.

Here are a few precautions you need to follow which are essential if you want to recover deleted NEF photos on mac.

1. Remove NEF Files on the Hard Disk and put then in a safe place so that you won't accidentally overwrite your deleted NEF Files.

2. Don't save any files to Hard Disk

If you do save new images to the Hard Disk, then chances are the deleted files will be overwritten by the new images rendering deleted NEF photos for mac unrecoverable.

After the installation, lauch Mac NEF Photo recovery tool. The main panel shows like this:

The local and the external drives that are detected with Mac NEF Photo recovery tool. Select the hard drive that you connected as slave, and click the Next button to proceed to the next step.

On clicking the Next button, a new window pops up. The various types of photo files, audio files, and video files are displayed, as shown in the figure below. You can select specifically, the file types you wish to recover, or select all the file types, if you wish to recover all the media files, based on your requirement.

Note: By default, all the photo, audio and video files are selected for recovery. You can disable this feature, by clicking the Deselect all button.

After selecting the file types, click the Recover button, to start to recover digital NEF photos for Mac. A new window displays, the progress made in the recovery process, and also lists the number of files that have been found. You can use the Show selected file types option, to display the file types you selected in the previous step.

Once the scanning process is completed, the recovered media files are grouped together and listed in their respective folders. Clicking any of the folder displays, the recovered files of the respective file type, under that folder,

Once the files are recovered, you can select a particular file, and click on the View button, to preview the image.

The last step is to save all the recovered media files to a destination drive. You can select specific files for saving, or, click on the Select All button, to select all the files that have been recovered.

Click the Save button, and select the destination drive, onto which you want the files to be saved. You can also use the Save scan info button to save information about a particular scan task.

Raw photo captured by a Nikon digital camera; saved in an uncompressed format that stores data exactly as it was captured by the CCD; adjustments to settings such as exposure and white balance can be made with software once the image is saved to a computer.

Accidental deleting

• "Command + Del" without backup
• "Delete All" when deleting not-so-good photos
• Delete pictures instead of saving by accidentally pressing wrong button
• Emptying trash without backup

• "Media/Drive is not formatted would you like to format now?"
• Mac OS X prompts for disk initialization when digital camera memory card is just connected.

Virus infection/attack

Unexpected power off

Other reasons

• Factory setting of device
• Losing photos during transferring photos from storage device to PC/laptop
• Pulling out card while the camera is on
• Turning off the camera during a write process