Is your image gone forever? Maybe not.
Digital imaging technology is often regarded as being more secure than traditional film technology. There's no film to inadvertently expose and no temperamental darkroom chemicals. Images are stored as reproducible bits and bytes that can be duplicated a million times without any image degradation.
Digital technology is designed to be secure. Nevertheless, in a number of circumstances, it's just as vulnerable to calamity as conventional film. For instance, batteries can fail at the most inopportune moments, and one false click could obliterate an entire day's work.
At the top of the list of potential mishaps is the accidental deletion of images on memory cards. Everyone knows the fear of hastily hitting the wrong combination of buttons on the back of the digital camera. Until recently, the only solution was to reshoot the lost images or take the memory card to a data recovery service where they could attempt to extract the lost images. Thankfully, times have changed.
ImageRecall and similar applications give photographers the ability to salvage seemingly lost images on removable memory cards by treating the cards like hard drives. ImageRecall software, currently available for Windows systems only, automates the process by choosing the best approach for examining the card and extracting the images, whether it's scanning the card sector-by-sector or simply reading it as another logical drive.
Recovering images with ImageRecall is both straightforward and intuitive. Simply connect the card reader to your computer and determine which drive letter the operating system assigns it. Run ImageRecall, select the appropriate drive, and wait for the program to display the capacity of the card. If the program is not able to determine the card's size or it displays an error message before recovering any images, it might be difficult to recover those images at all.
ImageRecall begins the recovery process by automatically selecting the best method of searching for and extracting images from the card. It recovers each image sequentially as it displays the number of the sector being examined. Each image is saved to a specified directory on the computer's hard drive. The only other visual clue that the program is working is a progress bar that shows the percentage of files on the card that have been recovered.
The program can be run in the background as a minimized task, or it can be run in the foreground with a viewer displaying a thumbnail of each image as it is recovered. The viewer can also be used to browse the directory in which the recovered files have been stored.
Operation is fully automated, but the application occasionally encounters read errors when attempting to extract images from the last sectors of the card, and it sometimes saves partial images. That's normal. Image files often become fragmented after a long photo session in which the captures are frequently saved and deleted from the memory card.
ImageRecall works in almost every situation, but it will not recover images that have been deleted by digital cameras that permanently erase data from the card. In these situations you can send the card to ImageRecall's FlashFixers headquarters, where there are more sophisticated ways to retrieve data.
Several culprits can be blamed for image file loss or corrupted removable media cards. Images are lost when the memory card is removed from the digital camera before the last pictures are written to it, or removed from a printer before a print or index print is finished. Pictures are also lost when they're taken faster than the digital camera can successfully store them.
Other potential problems include inadvertently deleting all the images on a card, or when the card is sent through an airport's X-ray machine. (Some memory card manufacturers say airport X-ray machines are a problem, while others say the latest machines will not affect stored images.) Memory cards are also adversely affected by the large static charges common in very dry weather conditions and extreme high or low temperatures.
ImageRecall runs on most Windows-based computers and supports a variety of media cards, including CompactFlash, SmartMedia cards, Secure Digital cards, Memory Sticks, Microdrives, MultiMedia cards and xD Picture Cards. It recognizes all the primary imaging file formats, including BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF. It can be downloaded from the www.flashfixers.com Web page as a free, demo version, which is limited to extracting 10 images from a memory card; the full working version is $39.95. A Macintosh compatible version is in the works and should be available before the end of the year.