Recovering deleted photos – my experiences
- (playing with the camera) Cool. You can change the format of the CF card… Whops….
- My CF card got corrupted.
- The photos I thought had been already uploaded to the gallery were deleted from both the CF card and the harddisk. Moreover, I already took 50 photos on the CF card after reformatting it.
Time and time again, I realize how precious my photos are, only after they are gone. The last time they were my PhD defense photos… Auch. Fortunately, they are gone, but not forever 
You will find several tools for photo recovery on Google, but most of them either commercial or give you a only a “free preview”. Thinking about it, it’s a very good business model: people are very willing to swipe their card if they can see that they get their photos back. Should have written one as well Fortunately, there are also free ones, two of them I tried by myself.
PC Inspector Smart Recovery is an excellent and easy-to-use Windows application for photo recovery. It is extremely easy to use and does an amazing job. It is also completely free, but I think is fair to reward the author with a PayPal donation.
PhotoRec is a cross-platform program for photo recovery. In fact, it runs on Dos/Windows/Linux/BSD/Solaris/MacOSX, which is really impressive. It also supports a whole range of filesystems, including FAT/NTFS/Ext2/3/HFS+. It has a simple (n)curses based interface, which is a bit of a disappointment in the age of cool animated GUIs, but it’s also relatively easy to use. Also, it has an impressive range of configuration options. And it works on Linux and my Mac. I no longer need Windows! Simialrly, the program is really free (including the sourcre) and you can rewerd the author with a donation.
Both tools worked for me smoothly and (unlike some other commercial ones I tried which ran out of memory) managed to recover almost one thousand photos from my 4GB CF card, including the wanted defense photos I don’t know which of the tools is better and I recommend both (although I would lean slightly towards the PhotoRec as I don’t have Windows anymore). Also, if you don’t get what you’re looking for, you can try both of them (as a rule all image/disk recovery tools are read-only so you can try all of them many times with no risk).