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Sooner or later, you’re going to accidentally delete an image that you meant to keep. You may even inadvertently execute the innocent-sounding Format command and wipe out an entire memory card full of image files. It’s the modern day equivalent to shooting a whole roll of film with the lens cap on — it happens to everyone eventually.

The good news is there are software programs that will probably help you reverse the error. There’s no ironclad guarantee that you’ll be able to recover all of pictures, but the odds are in your favor.

As you surely know, digital images are stored on memory cards as a set numbers. The numbers occupy a finite space, but it’s not always contiguous. When an image is deleted, the space it occupies is not actually erased. Instead the space is marked as being “available” so that the system knows it can write a new image there. When a memory card is formatted, the File Allocation Table (which is sort of the Table of Contents combined with the Index) marks all of the space “free” and available. Once this happens, the image – even though it’s still there – is no longer acknowledged by the camera or your computer, and a new image file can be written in the space it occupies.

The single most important thing to remember – and this is absolutely crucial if you hope to recover any of the images – is that you must stop saving pictures to that card. If you keep shooting there’s a very strong chance that the new images will be written in the space occupied by the images you accidentally deleted, rendering them unrecoverable.

If neither the camera nor the computer can “see” the deleted images, how can they be recovered? Certain specialized software has the ability to explore the contents of a memory card to locate and reclaim image files. You’ll need a high-speed USB (2.0) card reader/writer connected to your PC and the right software package. The software attempts to locate all images and image fragments, not just the ones most recently deleted, so it may take awhile and you may end up with a mishmash of full and partial images – a small penalty considering the alternative!

Here are two of the most popular image recovery programs. Regardless which you choose, you’d be smart to install it on your computer and take it for a test spin before you actually need to recover images. You wouldn’t wait until the pilot passed out before you learned how to fly an airplane if you could avoid it, right?

SanDisk bundles Rescue PRO 2.0 image recovery software with their Extreme line of memory cards. The menu driven software is straight-forward and provides two scanning options: Quick Scan “if the media is not corrupt or formatted” (their words) and Full Scan if it is. It’s fairly fast even in the Full Mode – it scanned a 512Mb card in less than seven minutes – and displays the recovered images in a list or as thumbnails. Simple, quick and sure.

Image Rescue™ 2.0 from Lexar Media is a powerful, easy-to-use program that works with all brands of memory cards and provides three recovery modes.

High Level Search

• This is the fastest mode, but it works only if the card has not been reformatted. This method is capable of restoring any type of file – not just image files – and retains the original file names and extensions. Still, as with any recovery program, there is no guarantee that it can recover any files at all. Because it uses the existing file structure information on the card, it may not work if the data is badly corrupted.

Low Level Search

• Unlike the High Level Search, this mode is not able to restore the original file names, but it will work even when the card has been reformatted or the data is badly corrupted. This method is slow because it examines every byte of data on the card, looking for patterns that indicate the existence of image files.

Extensive Search

• This recovery method operates in a similar way to the Low Level Search, only more thoroughly. It recovers leftover image fragments as well as full images.

Image Rescue™ 2.0 also performs other functions. Use it to test your card for errors, reformat, display the card’s technical specifications, or permanently erase all files on your card (rendering them unrecoverable by any means).

As you may have realized, there’s an additional lesson to be learned here. If you sell your digital camera or lend it to a friend, it may be possible for someone to see the images you’ve taken recently, even if you’ve deleted them or formatted the memory card. Unless you want to share your pictures with others, use the Secure Erase feature that’s part of Lexar’s Image Rescue software to permanently obliterate the image files and render them unrecoverable.

You’ll get fine results from either of these programs, but there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to recover the images you’ve deleted by mistake. Above everything else, stop shooting immediately after an accidental deletion. Good luck.

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