I deleted the wrong picture!

Have you ever accidentally deleted a picture from your digital camera and thought, “Oh no that was like the best picture I took”. Well today I’m going to talk about a great little program that you can use to restore those accidentally deleted pictures. Unfortunately this program is only for Windows users, so sorry Mac and Linux users. It’s called PC INSPECTOR smart recovery 4.5 and can be downloaded for free from here.

First let me explain a bit about how digital media (film) in your camera works when your delete a picture. When you delete picture the camera basically is told to ignore the file on the storage card. The camera then is allowed to copy over that “space” when a new picture is taken. The original picture is still there until a new picture overwrites it, but the camera does use space in a liner sense but rather at random. Meaning that a picture that was deleted a few shots ago could still be restored.

Now even though I said that you could continue to take pictures and it would still be possible to restore them the likely hood of restoring the picture you want decreases with each new photo. The best thing to do is not to take any more using that digital media card, i.e. compact flash, SD, etc. if your camera only uses built in memory then you are out of luck depending on how important that deleted picture was. I keep a spare card in my camera bag for just such occasions.

All you have to do is plug your camera into your computer and run the program, it will then ask you to choose the media to be restored, this is your camera. A place to put the restored photos, I created a folder on my desktop and called it restored pictures, pretty simple. Hit the start button and you are off, the default setting uses a quick scan that will restore most of the pictures. You also have the option of doing a deep scan; the deep scan takes a very long time but can restore more pictures. So if the quick scan didn’t restore the picture you wanted, try this option when the quick scan is done and you might find that lost photo.

Keep in mind this program will restore all the pictures it can find on the cameras memory card, so if there is a chance of an embarrassing photo its probably best not to do this with a crowd standing around. When I used the program I was able to restore pictures from months earlier so be cautious.

So the next time you accidentally delete the wrong picture, don’t freak out, you might be able to get it back.

Anyways sorry this is only for Windows, I’ll keep my eyes open for a good one for Macs and Linux computers. If you know of one please email to let me know or better yet post a comment about it.