Find, save and recover lost digital images

To prevent that the new made images from the digital camera are suddenly gone or

unintentionally deleted

, you should not delete the photos directly in the camera, but first download them on the computer. If then an image is unmeant deleted, there is still a backup on the cameras memorycard.

Is the memory-card accidently deleted or through an error not readable anymore, there are a few programs specialized to try to resolve the lost images.

Windows: Digital Image Recovery (Freeware)

The freeware program from "Firma Zero Assumption" runs on Windows 98 or later and is able to

recognize and recover GIF, JPEG, TIFF and Canon RAW-imagefiles

. Therefor the digital-camera has to be connected to the computer or the memorycard has to be inserted in a cardreader. The program then tries to save as many the pictures as possible to a previously given destination folder. Download

Windows: PC Inspector smart recovery

Convar brings with PC Inspector smart recovery also a

freeware data-recovery programm

for saving digital photos. After the start, you choose the source drive and the image format to search for (mostly JPG) and let the found pictures be saved in a target directory. Download

Windows: PhotoRescue (Shareware)

PhotoRescue is a shareware program for Apple Mac OS and Windows computers. The demoversion tries to find all images on the memorycard and shows them in an overview. Only to save the found pictures to another drive or directory, you need the full version. The advantage: The program is in most of the times able to save images, even when the drives file-table (FAT) destroyed is. Download

Mac OS X: EXIF Untrasher

This freeware program for Apple OS X scans for images on a drive by Exif-Data. They are written to the imagefiles by most of the modern digital cameras. To work, the computer has to recognize the camera or memory-card still as a drive with a working filetable. Download