If you’ve lost your digital images, Don’t Panic. Stop doing anything more to the card. Use ImageRecall (or other recovery software) especially designed to recover digital images from memory cards.

Make sure you have the card connected to your computer properly via a standard USB card reader or PCMCIA adapter (do not use the camera or camera dock).

Check My Computer for the letter drive of the card. Don’t worry that Windows may shows gibberish for filenames or may not display the capacity of the card or even asks you to reformat the card. Even under these conditions, ImageRecall can often still access the card and recover your pictures.

After selecting the letter drive, look for ImageRecall to display the capacity of the card. If nothing is displayed, or an error message appears, ImageRecall cannot begin. If the connections look OK, the card may be completely dead and the pictures non-recoverable.

If you start to get read errors at the beginning of the card, the card is corrupted beyond what ImageRecall can recover. However, you may still be able to recover your pictures using FlashFixers Image Recovery Service.

Once ImageRecall starts its recovery (without read errors), let it do its work and completely examine the card. Read errors at the very end of the card are normal and can be ignored. The last file saved may be larger in size, that’s OK too.

If you deleted or formatted your SmartMedia, xD card, or Memory Stick, and no images are recovered using ImageRecall, you can almost be certain that your camera is from one of the manufacturers (Fuji, Olympus, and Sony, eg.) that permanently erase data from the card.

ImageRecall automatically selects the best method to recover the files, either by logical or physical access to the card. Recovery is sequential and filenames are automatically assigned.

Sometimes only partial images are found. This means the picture data on the card ended abruptly. ImageRecall depends on recovered files being contiguous from beginning to end. Cameras do not always record the pictures this way, especially if a lot of pictures already exist on the card. That is one reason we recommend formatting a new or used card in the camera each time before use (after you’ve saved the pictures on your computer, of course).

Always make regular backups of your picture files and your computer files.