Recover Photos

Digital cameras and scanners are very popular, and image editing software makes it easy to enhance and print your own pictures. So most of us now store our photo albums digitally, on computers. But computer storage is fragile, and it's all too easy to delete, destroy or lose your digital images.

If you have lost photos from your computer, or from your digital camera or memory card, don't panic! Unless you are very unlucky, those images are still on the disk. With the help of some inexpensive do it yourself data recovery software, it's easy to get them back. The most important thing is not to write anything to the disk or memory card until you have had a chance to recover the lost images.

Check the Recycle Bin

Before you start to use data recovery software, check that the photos haven't simply been deleted! Open the Recycle Bin and click on the Type column header. Look to see if any of the deleted files are photo images. These are usually JPG or JPEG files, though some scanners may create TIF or TIFF files, and some digital cameras may create other file types such as RAW. If you find the files, select them, right-click them and click Restore.

Photo Recovery

If your photos haven't simply been deleted, then you'll need some data recovery software to restore them. There are many data recovery and photo recovery programs to choose from, and you may find it hard to decide which one is best.

To recover lost photos we don't recommend using general purpose unerase or undelete software. In many cases these programs could recover the photos. But specialist photo recovery software has features such as thumbnail previews of all the recoverable images, which makes the job of identifying your lost pictures much easier.

Even more importantly, photo recovery software is designed to look specifically for digital images. This means that it will find them when the more general purpose software may not. Don't waste time using software that may not find your photos, causing unnecessary anxiety.

Click here for photo recovery software

Photo recovery software is very easy to use. You don't need to be a computer expert. You just start the software and tell it where to look. It will then scan the disk or memory card, which may take half an hour or so depending on the size of the disk or the speed of the memory card.

When it has finished it will display a list of thumbnails showing the image files it found. This will make it easy to identify the photos you have lost.

To restore the lost photos, just select them and tell the software where to save them. If you are recovering photos on a hard drive you will need another drive - such as an external hard drive or a USB memory stick - to save them to. You must avoid writing to the drive containing the lost photos, or you may overwrite the data that you want to restore.

See a tutorial on how to recover photos using Flash Recovery