How to recover lost photos from a digital camera memory card

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Accidentally reformatting or deleting photos from a memory card full of digital snaps is one way to end a holiday on a low note, but it doesn’t mean your memories are gone forever. Zero Assumption Recovery can recover a variety of digital camera file formats from a memory card and it may just be enough get you out of a hole.

The application, ZAR for short, costs $49.95, but there’s a trial version that’s limited to recovering to contents of four folders each time you run it – which should be more than enough, given that most digital cameras store their photos in one or two folders.

If you’re reading this in a panic because you think you’ve lost your digital photos, then this next bit of advice won’t be much use to you – but it’s still worth bearing in mind. It’s essential to stop using a memory card the moment you think it has a problem and adding just one more photo to it could make the missing photos inaccessible. So, remove the memory card from the camera if you can’t see your photos and keep it in a safe place until you can get to a PC.

Step 1
With Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR) downloaded and installed, insert your memory card (or connect your camera to your PC) and run the program. You’ll see a warning about interference from antivirus programs each time you start ZAR, but you can disable this and/or temporarily disable your antivirus program during the recovery process.

Step 2
There’s nothing to change on the first of ZAR’s screens, so just click Next.

Step 3
Select the Recover images from the digital camera memory card option and click Next.

Step 4
Select your memory card from the list of drives that appears. If you’ve connected your camera to your PC via USB, this will only work if the camera appears as a mass storage device with a drive letter in My Computer. If not, you’ll need to slip the memory card into a memory card reader. Click Next.

Step 5
ZAR will then scan the memory card for files to recover – this may take a while, depending on the size of the card and the number of photos. You’ll get better performance with a card reader rather than a PC-USB-camera connection here, but it's not like you have anything better to do, right?

Step 6
ZAR will display a list of files that it can recover – it’s easiest to just select ROOT here to select them all. Click Next.

Step 7
Click the … button under Destination to choose where to save the recovered photos – DO NOT USE THE MEMORY CARD YOU’RE RECOVERING PHOTOS FROM. Uh, got that..?

Click the Start copying the selected files button when you’re ready to roll.

Step 8
That’s it! Click the Exit button to quit ZAR and then open the folder you chose in step 7 to see the results of your recovery. If you have all the photos you want, try formatting the memory card in your digital camera to make sure that it still works normally (that’s assuming that you didn’t just delete the photos accidentally, of course…).