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Dave Johnson's expert tips promise to enhance your expertise with your digital camera, scanner, printer, and image editing software.
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Dave's Favorites: Recover Lost Pictures With ImageRecall 3

For a digital photographer, there's probably nothing worse than taking a batch of pictures, getting home, and inexplicably finding that there's nothing on the media card to transfer to your computer. If this hasn't happened to you, count your blessings. I've had it happen to me only once: The media card suffered a full-blown hardware failure, and its contents are forever lost to me.

Many other problems are survivable, though: You might accidentally delete the pictures by pressing the wrong button on your camera, for instance. For these kinds of situations, it helps to have a program like FlashFixers' ImageRecall 3.

Last year, I reviewed ImageRecall and found that it was fast, easy to use, and reliable. The new version is even better.

ImageRecall 3 can scan any drive letter on your PC--which means you can recover deleted pictures from anywhere, even on your own hard drive. Just pop in the media (like a CompactFlash card or CD), start scanning, and ImageRecall quickly displays the most recently "lost" images on the card. Not satisfied? Ask for a deep scan and the program looks harder. When I tested ImageRecall 3, it easily found folders I erased using the camera's Delete feature, and the deep scan turned up dozens of pictures I had discarded weeks and even months ago.

By default, ImageRecall places your recovered photos in a folder in My Documents, but you can specify a different output folder. You can also fine-tune other options, like what kind of files to recover--the program seems to support just about every format imaginable, including JPEG, TIFF, several varieties of RAW, MP3, and various video formats.

Of course, ImageRecall 3 was unsuccessful with my totally dead card. I didn't expect it to work, though; I always insert that card when testing image recovery software just to see how the program reacts.

If you are ever unlucky enough to lose pictures, you're unlikely to find a better solution than ImageRecall 3. Go to FlashFixers to download a free trial, or buy the full version for $40.