Step-by-Step guide for Recovering Digital Photos from Flash Card

Q: My significant other accidentally formatted the 2gb Compact Flash card in our Canon Rebel digital camera with pictures still on it. We caught it right away, so there were no pictures taken over the top of the old ones. Does anyone have any suggestions for recovering the old photos? Thank you very much.

A: No, it's not possible once the part of memory that contained the file has been overwritten.  A shadow of what was there before remains on a hard disc or rewritable CD/DVD, and that is recoverable with expensive technology;  but a flash drive is more like RAM -- it's volatile memory.  There's nowhere physical for the shadow to be left. You could try Wondershare Photo Recovery, but it isn't the easiest.

A memory card or flash card is an electronic flash memory data storage device used for storing digital information. They are commonly used in many electronic devices, including digital cameras, mobile phones, laptop computers, MP3 players, and video game consoles. They are small, re-recordable, and they can retain data without power.

The most common type of memory card in use today is the Flash card, which comes in capacities of up to 64 Gigabytes. In addition to these and other types of memory cards, there are also non-solid-state memory cards that do not use flash memory, and there are different types of flash memory. Many cards incorporate wear leveling algorithms in their design.

Accidental deleting

» "Shift + Del" without backup

» "Delete All" when deleting not-so-good photos

» Delete pictures instead of saving by accidentally pressing wrong button

» Emptying Recycle Bin without backup

Formatting

» "Media/Drive is not formatted would you like to format now?"

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

Flash Cards and other Memory cards do not immediately re-use space from deleted files and leave it there for a while after the file has been deleted; therefore you can recover deleted photos from Flash Card. A Photo that has been deleted a while ago still has a good chance of being recovered, but the chances of an absolute undelete decrease the longer you leave it, because it is only a matter of time before that space is re-used and overwritten. So the Key to recovering your deleted photos is to act immediately and you will be almost guaranteed to have your files back.

You can get back deleted photos from flash card on your own with a good photo recovery software. Quick Internet searches will give you a tremendous number of programs that advertise lost photo recovery, and most of them cost between $25 - $40. And I'm using a program called Wondershare Photo Recovery that does the very same job but just cost me $29.95. Now I will tell you how to get back deleted photos by Photo Recovery:

If you have deleted/lost files from your flash card and want to recover most of those, PLEASE STOP TAKING ANY MORE photoS/VIDEOS from your Flash Card. That’s because the more you write new data on your memory card, the chances of recovering old and deleted data becomes less .

Wondershare Photo Recovery is reliable photo recovery software to easily perform photo recovery and Flashmemory card recovery with nice quality. It is also non-destructive media recovery software which helps you retrieve video, restore audio, and recover music from all storage devices. No matter your photos or multimedia files have been deleted accidently, memory cards have been formatted.

After the installation, lauch this photo recovery tool. The main panel shows like this:

The Photo Recovery start to scan your disk including your PC hard disk and your Flashmemory card. This step may take some time depending on the size of disk space. You don't need to wait until scanning is finished and you can click "Next" to finish scanning.

Here you can preview the available and recoverable photos you want to recover like below.

After you select path or enter a directory for recovered photos, you can click "Next" button to recover the photos from Flash Card.

For better running Photo Recovery and get higher recovery quality, please check your computer system at first.