Having a memory card die with priceless photos on it is one of the biggest nightmares in digital photography. If do-it-yourself fixes fail, the next step is often to turn to a professional data recovery service. But have you ever wondered how that advanced data recovery works?
A photographer was able to recover about $7,000 in equipment stolen from his car in a hotel parking lot thanks to a set of Apple AirTags he had attached to some of the items.
Back in 2008, I was in the Middle East in the military. I wasn't permitted to have my mobile phone in that location at the time, so I took a relatively cheap digital camera and used it to capture reams of unique photos.
Industry professionals recommend that photographers backup files locally on an external hard drive as well as with a cloud service. Even the best of us don’t always do this, which means we may delete files we never meant to, or we may lose them if something happens to our devices.
ProGrade Digital today expanded beyond memory cards and readers and into the world of software with the introduction of Recovery Pro. It's a program that recovers lost, deleted, and or/corrupted photo and video files.
Paradise, California lies just 90 minutes north of Sacramento, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Home to 26,000 people, Paradise includes several mobile home parks and is known as a retirement haven.
Like many professional photographers, my main camera is a bit of a beast. A Fuji X-T2, usually with a big lens, and always with a battery grip on it. It’s a bit big to go traveling with, and although it’s not as big as my Nikon D600 and grip that I used to use, it still warrants the travel/side-arm camera I bought in the D600 days.
There's a new photo recovery technique that may help humanity recover some of the world's oldest photographs that were previously considered to be damaged beyond repair.
Kaleb White is an outdoor photographer who has had to overcome a difficult challenge that most people will never face. Two years ago, while shooting in New Zealand, White was run over and crushed by a 2.5-ton truck.
Record-smashing rainfall brought by Hurricane Harvey recently flooded thousands of homes across the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, including my grandmother’s home in Southwest Houston. Despite being located in a flood-prone area, her single-story house had never flooded before in more than five decades of her living in that house.
This is one of the luckiest, craziest stolen gear recovery stories we've ever heard. Five months after a man had $34K in gear—including a pre-production Canon 1D X Mark II—stolen out of his car, he actually got it back after the thief sold one of the stolen lenses to a police officer.
When photo storage site Picturelife shut down, users were left high and dry without a way to access and/or download the images they had stored there. This didn't sit well with SmugMug, who reached out to Picturelife and, today, is helping reunite those photographers with their lost images.
When Japan was devastated by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, countless families lost precious photos in their homes that washed away. In response, many organizations sprung up to recover, restore, and reunite photos with their owners.
One company that launched a huge initiative was Ricoh. In the four years following the disaster, the company's "Save the Memory" project found and cleaned 418,721 photos, returning 90,128 pictures to the people who lost them.
July 4, 2011 is a day architectural and commercial portrait photographer Kevin Young will never forget. While taking a short break from a plethora of assignments he was working on, he was involved in a swimming accident that broke his C4-C6 vertebre, paralyzing him from the neck down.
In the above video, Young details his recovery, how he used photography as a motivation, and how the entire situation left him with a desires to help others, including the woman who saved his life.
Late last month, we shared with you a story about a team of computer scientists, archivists, artists and curators who recovered photo-manipulation work by famed artist Andy Warhol that had been trapped on 41 ‘lost’ floppy disks from the introduction of the Amiga computer system.
Today, we dive further behind the scenes with a fascinating followup video, provided by the Hillman Photography Initiative of the Carnegie Museum of Art, that takes a look at the incredible amount of work and dedication that went into actually recovering these files.
It’s probably every photographer’s worst nightmare. You’ve shot gigabytes worth of images, ready to be imported for post-processing, when suddenly: card is unreadable. Your captures are all gone. All that time and effort lost to a corrupted card. It happened to me, and this is how I got them back.
The dark world of heroin addiction has been the subject of award-winning photography before -- LIFE magazine photographer Bill Eppridge's gripping photo essay about two heroin addicts is as enthralling now as it ever was -- but photographer Graham MacIndoe's series is different... because he was both the photographer and the subject.
Almost 25 years later, the country of Romania is still in the midst of a difficult transformation from one of the region’s hardest dictatorships to a modern European nation. A transformation that photographer Tamas Dezso masterfully captures in his series Notes for an Epilogue.
Camera equipment has long been attractive to the eyes of thieves. After all, it's generally portable, pricey, and a piece of cake to sell through channels such as Craigslist. In Northern California, robbers have begun targeting photojournalists at gunpoint in order to snatch their gear.
Developer Trevor Sehrer, a Google engineer by day, has been working on a website that aims to help combat the theft of photography gear. It's called Lenstag, and is an online equipment registry that makes it easier to report and track stolen cameras and lenses.
PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a serious problem that affect a huge percentage of war veterans. A condition once associated most strongly with Vietnam War veterans, the Afghanistan and Iraq war have brought the condition back into the public eye with a vengeance.
According to the National Institute of Health, the VA estimates that approximately 31% of Vietnam vets, 10% of Desert Storm vets, 11% of Afghanistan vets and 20% of Iraq war veterans are affected. And while photography has been used to great effect to document PTSD in the past, one nurse at the VA in Palo Alto, California is using it to help treat veterans with the condition.
Sunday morning: time to survey the damage from last night's party. As I walked around the apartment picking up empty beer bottles and cups, wiping up spills, and putting the furniture back, I remember having a distinct feeling that something was amiss. A quick survey of the apartment, and it hits me. My DSLR was missing.
Even as I frantically searched every nook and cranny of the apartment I knew the answer: someone had stolen my camera.
There's an abandoned McDonalds in California that's stuffed with 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape. These tapes contain never-before-seen ultra-high-res photographs of the moon shot by the Lunar Orbiter project 40 years ago. Rather than ship the film back to Earth, scientists decided to scan them on the spaceship, beam them back losslessly, and then record the data onto magnetic tape. Not wanting to reveal the precision of its spy satellites, the US government decided to mark the images as classified.
If you've ever deleted a photo by accident you probably already know about applications like DiskDigger that can go in and recover the image from the electronic beyond. This can come in really handy when an overzealous clicking finger accidentally erases several worthwhile pictures from your hard drive. Up until now, however, there was no way to perform the same search and rescue on your mobile device. Fortunately, DiskDigger for Android changes that.
Here's a useful idea related to the memory card recovery tutorial we shared yesterday: if you're ever confronted by someone who forces you to delete your photos (and our magical photographers' rights gray card doesn't work), go ahead and delete them! What most people don't know is that deleted photos can easily be recovered afterward. Even photos on a memory card that's formatted and completely wiped can usually be restored.
Last night my pastor emailed me telling me that he had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs off his Sony compact camera, and that Sony's technical support informed him that it would cost $200-300 for them to recover the photos. After I got a hold of the memory card, I checked some of the recovery programs I've used in the past, but discovered that they now require paid licenses to actual do recovery (though analysis is free). I then stumbled across PhotoRec, a free and open source command-line application that's bundled with TestDisk, something I've successfully used to regain access to inaccessible external hard drives.
In this post I'm going to show you how you can use PhotoRec to recover your photos if you've accidentally deleted them or formatted your memory card.
Do you know what to do if one of your prints gets damaged …
A few times in the past I’ve had to recover data from memory cards. Once it was a friend who …