D.I.Y.

IMAGING

Lost photo rescued by CameraSalvage.

UNZAP FLASH MEMORY

How to salvage deleted pictures from camera memory. By Mark Frauenfelder

When I was in Japan for a few days last year, I took a lot of pictures of people wearing uniforms. It seemed like everyone in Tokyo, from leaf raker to hair stylist to vending machine mechanic, was wearing a slick-looking uniform.

When I got back to my hotel room after a day of shooting, I was eager to upload the photos to my iBook so I could post them to my blog. I plugged my digital camera into my computer, started uploading photos, and when the process was complete, no photos were there! Worse, the photos on my memory card were gone.

I wrote it off as bad luck and went out to take more pictures. When I got back, I emailed a friend and told him what had happened. He said, “Don’t take any more pictures!” He told me to try CameraSalvage, an application specifically designed

to recover photographs that were deleted from flash memory cards by mistake.

It turns out that flash memory stores data much like a hard drive. When a file is erased, it’s really the directory, not the file, that’s deleted.

Since I had already taken several pictures after the disaster, I didn’t have much hope of recovering the uniform shots, but I gave it a try.

Fingers crossed, I fired up the application. CameraSalvage filled a folder with most of the photos I’d lost. I haven’t had an occasion to use the application again, and I hope I never will, but it’s nice knowing I have it in case things go wrong.

CameraSalvage: $40, www.SubRosaSoft.com

Mark Frauenfelder is editor-in-chief of MAKE.

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