Flutterby™! : Imagery Recovery 2009-01-27 04:19:13.180918+00

Imagery Recovery

2009-01-27 04:19:13.180918+00 by ebradway 6 comments

My brother-in-law accidently reformatted the flash card in his camera. Of course, he failed to copy the photos from Christmas to his computer. Of course, he also took a few pictures with the newly formatted card. Tough break for someone with their first child (and the first grandchild).

So I'm sitting here digging through the evil spawn of shareware that is "trial ware". A quick Google for "flash card recovery" returns dozens upon dozens of software that claims to do everything and then some... (details in comments)

So far, I have found Lexar's link to the Image Rescue 3). The link works - not sure why it's there. But it's free - just enter an email address (doesn't even have to be valid). This software extracted 168 files from the 2GB card. I got 16 Quicktime MOVs and 170 JPEGs. Only 58 JPEGs turned out correct (some had vertical lines that I attributed to the camera) and 8 Quicktime MOVs.

I had really good luck with the demo of PhotoRescue Advanced. It's a little pricey, $99 to register. There is a Beginner/Expert version that does about as well as the Lexar for $29. In "Expert" mode, PhotoRescue picked up several more images than the Lexar software. I didn't bother to count the results and couldn't save them. Damn trial ware!

The Advanced version of PhotoRescue lets you visually work with fragmented images and lost clusters. I was able to piece together several more files. Part of the piecing together process involves saving the good images and "hiding" the clusters. Oddly, this works in the trial version. I was able to individually save the good files. This time 65 JPEGs turned out correct (some still had vertical lines). It recovered 17 MOVs including 9 correct files.

Currently waiting for PaintShopPro to download. Based on postings elsewhere, word has it that good ol' PSP does a great job handling corrupted JPEGs.

I successfully recovered my images from a broken flash drive. I used rdd to get an image from the broken flash drive, then recoverjpeg to find the jpegs in the image.

PhotoRec managed only 10 JPGs and 9 MOVs. Maybe I need to fiddle with it more - but it seems to lack the ability to reconstruct fragmented images that PhotoRescue uses.

I'm thinking I should make another pass at PhotoRescue and see what I can manage.

Another pass with PhotoRescue managed 82 JPGs. Now let me see if PSP can clean them up.