How to recover deleted pictures from memory card

Everybody has a digital camera now days. More and more people are using digital cameras to record the wonderful moments. But it seems the digital pictures are easier to get lost than traditional film camera because it has a useful but "dangerous" delete button or feature. A mistake operation may delete one or all the pictures instantly. Do you think the valuable pictures were lost permanently. NO! You may use some easy way to recover them in most cases.

Digital Camera stores the pictures you take as separate files on flash memory card (also known as "Digital Film"). Memory cards have many different types, e.g. SD, CF, xD Picture Card, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MMC Card and more. Each card type has different brands. e.g. Sandisk, Kingston and more. They have different size, capacity and appearance, but they are just same when act as a storage to hold the pictures - they just like your old floppy disk or hard drive. When you deleted one or more pictures on your camera, you camera locate the picture files on memory card, then make them as "deleted" and mark the space they take as usable. In most cases, for fast process, camera doesn't delete the picture file body and just leave them as is, which makes it possible for us to retrieve them back after deletion.

OK, let's begin. To recover the deleted pictures, you need to connect your camera to your computer (usually via USB). If your camera cannot appear as a drive letter in "My Computer", an external USB card reader is necessary. You may find such card reader from local computer shops, or Amazon, BestBuy, Walmart. They're very cheap, but very useful, not only for data recovery, but also for photo retrieval and process in daily life. When you insert the card in the card reader, and connect the card reader to your computer, it will appear as a drive letter in "My Computer", which will allow software tool to access the data on the memory card.

If you have got your camera or card reader connected, you may download the picture recovery software CardRecovery from the following URL:

http://www.cardrecovery.com/download.asp

It's a small download and you may get it in less than two minutes. Run the downloaded executable file and follow the instruction to install it to your computer, then launch it. It has a wizard style interface and very easy to use.

Click Next on the welcome window, it will bring you to step 1. On step 1, you may specify the drive letter of your camera or card reader, as well other options including file type to retrieve, destination location to save the recovered pictures. Click next to step 2 and the scan will start. Depends on the capacity of your card, it may take several minutes for the software to fully scan your memory card. The found pictures during the scanning will be listed. You may preview the detected pictures as thumbnail on step 3, and choose the deleted pictures that you need. After that, click Next again and CardRecovery will save the selected pictures to the location you specified on step 1.

Your deleted pictures are recovered and back again. Can't be easier and faster!

Tips:

1. Don't take more pictures on your memory card if you find you have deleted the pictures by mistake. Or it may cause overwriting and make them unrecoverable.

2. Use a USB 2.0 connection if available to connect your camera or card reader to your computer, it may make the scan much more faster than USB 1.x connection.

source: cardrecovery
How to recover deleted pictures from memory card