How to Restore Digital Photos for Free
When your digital camera is full of photos, you'll want to upload them to your hard drive to clear space on your camera. This process, however, doesn't always go as planned. If the photos never made it to your computer--and you've already deleted them from your camera--you'll need a recovery program to get the images back. This might be possible using free software from the Internet.
Other People Are Reading
Things You'll Need
- Computer with Internet access
- Memory card reader or cable to connect your camera to the computer
Instructions
-
-
1
Install and run file recovery software made for recovering digital photos. There are many free options including ArtPlus Digital Photo Recovery, Recuva by Piriform and Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR). Visit the websites, read about the programs and download one.
-
2
Specify the location and file type of your lost photos. The software may have a wizard to guide you through the process, or it will ask you to select information from its menus. If the files were on a memory card, the computer may see that as another disk drive. It may see the camera as a removable media drive. The file type is most likely Jpeg. If you're not sure, take a look at some photos you have copied from your camera to see what file type they are.
-
-
3
Choose from a list of images to recover or specify the file name, if you know it. The software will present you with a list of images which may or may not be accompanied by thumbnail pictures. Or it may let you input the name of the file.
-
4
Choose or specify a folder where the software will put the recovered files.
-
5
Click "Start" to begin the recovery process. Wait and watch as the files are recovered and saved to your hard drive. Depending on the number of files and software you choose, this may take some time.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
The best chance of recovering a file is if you have deleted it and not saved any new files to the drive or memory card since deleting the file. Any time you save a new file or take a new picture there's a chance the new file may be written to the part of the drive where your old file was located--making recovery of the old file impossible.
If you have formatted the memory card or drive where the photo was stored, it will be harder to recover the photo than if you only deleted the file.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit memory card image by Dariusz Urbanczyk from Fotolia.com
