The Open Source Ministry Blog

Now this is coincidence.

Exactly 1 year ago today I was dealing with some memory card issues and did some research (Memory Card Corruption Tips).

On Friday I was handed a camera that had been dropped and had images missing. I did what I could to get it back together, but we still could not access the images. Tonight I pulled the card out of the camera (I couldn’t find the proper USB cable for it) and plugged it into my personal digital camera, but I still could not find anything.

Then, after digging up the page linked above, I found PhotoRescue and did the trial run. It found lots of images so I paid the $29 registration fee. The result?

• About 10 minutes to scan a 256 MB SD card
• 94 images found
• 34.4 MB of files
• 2 images were just thumbnail size
• 3 were corrupted

Unfortunately the images I needed were not accessible. They were the 5 duds mentioned above and one of the thumbnails was a  junk image to begin with. These duds may have resulted from a test image being taken that may have overwritten some of the data.

This leaves 89 old images found. Some of them were many months old (I recognized the event). Some could have possibly been several years old, but there is a chance that someone just set the date wrong on the camera before those images were taken. This is a useful tool, but remember to be careful what images you take even if you plan to delete.

I did get a shock from the site though, The girl in the pictures here looks just like my daughter. Even my wife was shocked when she saw them.