Photographer's Nightmare: Camera can't read memory card. How to restore photos from memory card?

Like all horror movies starts: this moviepost based on a true story :-)

Imagine, you are ready for long five week vacation, just bought 32 Gigabyte Memory card can store thousands of your photos.


You are travelling all these five weeks all over the world and making great photos like a maniac without any limits: Paris, London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, San Francisco, South Africa, Beijing, flowers, bathrooms, museums, hotel rooms and probably some really private and unique experiences in Amsterdam or wherever else :-)

The last day of your vacation. Your memory card in your digital camera is full of your memories. Allmost all of 32 Gb is used. And bum! You see some really amazing stuff. You start making photos of this yet another really amazing stuff and... And nothing happens. What? What? Why this stupid camera are not making photos of this cool stuff??

Probably your camera is tired because of you, probably something else happens, but the message  "Card not formatted. Format card with this camera" is appeared. Oh, ok. Let's try world wide known universal engineering solution for any problem with digital devices: turn off and turn on.

"Card not formatted. Format card with this camera".




You are disappointed. At this moment, you've remembered all cool, great, superb, amazing photos you've done during your vacation. You start thinking what will you answer on questions like "Hey dude, when you will show me photos from your vacation? You've travelled all over the world and I want to see all of them!!!".

If you don't want to loose all your photos and you want to restore all of them, then please continue reading.
Below you will find step-by-step procedure for photo recovery/resurrection/restoration:-)

1. Identify the size of your memory card
2. Make sure that your hard drive has enough space to store all data from your memory card (e.g. if your memory is 32GB, then your hard drive must have at least 32GB free)
3. Make sure that your PC/notebook is able to read memory cards from your digital camera (e.g. your notebook has SD card reader)
4. Download TestDisk and PhotoRec application, unpack the archive, go to "win" folder
5. Plug in your memory card into card reader
6. Run photorec_win.exe as Administrator (right click -> run as administrator)
7. Select your memory card. If you have nothing plugged into your PC like USB flash cards and so on, then the first item will be your hard drive, the second - your memory card. Press down arrow and press enter:
   
   
8. Select partition type. If you don't know what is "partition type", then choose default one (Intel/PC) and press enter:
   
   
   Press enter again at the next screen:
   
   
   Select "Other" and press enter again at the next screen:
   
   
   Select "Whole" and press enter again at the next screen:
   
   
9. Define the folder where you want to store recovered photos and press Y (or just press Y if you want to use the same folder). Recovery procedure will be started automatically.
   
   
10. Relax, drink something :-) It will take up to 8 hours to restore 32gb of photos:
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
11. All fotos has been restored after almost eight hours!!!
12. Now you can open the folder you've selected. You will see a lot of folders named like "recup.dir.1", "recup.dir.2", etc. You will find the fotos inside these folders. Copy all of them into one folder and import this folder into your favourite photolibrary software like Picasa. EXIF data is restored also, so you will be able to sort them by date taken.
13. Have fun and share photos with your friends :-)

fotos and screenshots © sahikon/4bh