How to recover deleted, corrupted, or formatted pictures for free

Posted on August 18, 2007 at 5:49 pm

Whoops! You just formatted your digital camera’s memory card by accident and now all of your pictures are gone! Or maybe your card became corrupted and none of the pictures can be read anymore? Unfortunately, losing or deleting pictures from a memory card is a very common problem simply because so many people use them and sometimes press the wrong buttons on the camera!

Luckily, there are many software applications that can help you recover your lost digital photos. Pictures can be recovered because when a photo is deleted from a memory card, the link to the photo is removed, but not the actual data. You can think of it this way: you go to a library and look up a book in the database, but don’t find any information. Maybe the book was new and had not been put into their online system yet, but the physical book is still in the library, you just can’t find it easily.

Photo recovery programs because ignore the link and read all the books in the library and just spit them back out for you. They usually work very well unless some serious damage has been done to your card. One program that I have used, which does an excellent job and is totally free, is ArtPlus Digital Photo Recovery.

The program is only 1MB in size and doesn’t even have to be installed on your computer, it just a single executable file. To recover your photos, first connect the camera to your computer or use a card reader. Download the program and run it.

Go ahead and click Run Digital Photo Recovery at the top. Click Next and choose the drive for your memory card:

Next choose the target folder where you want to save the recovered photos:

Finally, go ahead and click Start to begin the process. Depending on the size of your memory card and your computer’s speed, the process can be anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. Either way, I’m sure the waiting time will be worth it!

I’ve tested the program by simply deleting all the photos off of my memory card (of course I saved them first) and running the program to see what it could recover. I was quite impressed with how well it worked! I was able to get back more than 90% of my photos. The other 10% were a little messed up and some were just empty files, but most came out perfect! Give it a shot and hopefully it works!

Any questions, post a comment!

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19 Responses to “How to recover deleted, corrupted, or formatted pictures for free”

  1. Sanjay said on : August 20th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    Awesome post - thanks. Spent most of weekend trying to find something like this.


  2. mehdi said on : August 26th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    tanks


  3. sedaghati mohammad said on : August 27th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    hi
    your progeram is very good


  4. Jamie said on : November 6th, 2007 at 4:49 am

    Hi there,

    My problem is that I formatted my pictures first, maybe more than 200 pics. Then I took 8 additional pics, and when I tried to get back my old pics I get the 8 newer ones.
    If you know anything about it, please help!!
    And thanks for all the info :P

    Jamie


  5. Kahn Arshad said on : December 3rd, 2007 at 7:33 am

    I saved my photos in a sub-folder and saved with other folders in a main folder. All other sub-folders contain the photos I saved but one is empty. How to retrieve the lost photos?

    Regards.


  6. Christina said on : December 17th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    This really helped! I was practically pulling my hair out thinking what a stupid thing I did deleting all the photos when all I really wanted to do was to delete ONE photo.


  7. Paolo said on : February 12th, 2008 at 8:54 pm

    Thank you very much, my friend will be really happy when I tell her that I recovered her pictures, because it’s almost 420 pix. thanks again


  8. akishore said on : February 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    I’m glad some of you guys have been able to recover your deleted pictures! It’s always fun to help someone!


  9. Melissa said on : March 25th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!! I took at least over 1000+ photos when I went to France about 2 summers ago and I pressed the format button by mistake :( and it erased them ALL, I was SO upset. I knew there had to be a way to recover them. Thank you thank you thank you thank you


  10. caj studios said on : March 30th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    THANK YOU SO SO SO SO MUCH! i love your post! it really helped me..


  11. Brandon said on : April 16th, 2008 at 1:43 am

    I was in thailand last week with my sister on a tour, and after taking a couple days worth of pictures, subsequent pic’s turned out white when taken during the day. Franticly trying to rectify the problem (probably some sort of brightness imabalance issue) I formatted our pictures, and was stuck with a camera that could only take normal looking pictures at night while everyone else around us were carrying on, happily snapping photos. It’s her birthday tomorrow and i’m going out to buy a digital photo frame and load it with what we had believed to be lost memories of our vacation. Thank you so so so so much


  12. Jiim said on : April 19th, 2008 at 5:02 am

    OH man, i thought my wife was going to kill me for formatting our card. i sure hope this works or this is my last entry online… please check my local paper to see if a man, 25, married and missing…. last seen formating a SD card when trying to renumber them so i know what she wanted me to print, since printer read the numbers diffrent then the camera does. hopefully i am not missing tomorrow.


  13. lisamc123 said on : April 20th, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    hi, this looks like a great site, but when i ran the program, sadly it came back with nothing! i accidently hit the format button on my camera and all the pictures are gone. i think i may have formatted it twice thinking it would fix the problem (silly me!) could this explain why im not getting any recovered files when i run this? im so upset that i cant get my pictures back, any advice?


  14. akishore said on : April 22nd, 2008 at 9:39 am

    lisamc123, I don’t think it’s possible to get the pictures back if you formatted twice. You can try searching on Google for some other photo recovery software, but unfortunately I think the pictures may be lost. :( Sorry!


  15. Dan said on : April 26th, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    Great work, very good software!
    You saved us over 200 pictures deleted accidentally by our little daughter.
    Thank you!


  16. Rick Matthews said on : May 2nd, 2008 at 4:55 am

    Some advice for people too. I’ve formatted my PC while I had a Jump Drive in the USB port so that’ll format the thing as well while the PC is being done, SD card stuff will be wiped out completely of course. I’ve also done this twice with Iomega Zip Drives (remember them from awhile ago LOL) so make sure you always remove a card reader if PC is so equipped so you don’t accidentally do what i’ve done in the past.

    You can also ruin cards or flash drives if you spark the thing while removing and NOT using the Win XP safely Remove Hardware feature. There’s a reason to do so, you can short out the thing by removing while hot and the card will also be sacrificed-sad but true.


  17. jemie said on : May 4th, 2008 at 11:04 pm

    wee! im so happy the software recovered all my corrupted pics.Ü i was so worried when some of the pics turned gray while the others were okay.


  18. huishan said on : May 11th, 2008 at 5:07 am

    oh my , thanks alot ! i recovered my pictures ! that was so awesome :D . THANKS ALOT , i aprreciated it .
    Have a nice day (:


  19. bob said on : May 18th, 2008 at 8:44 pm

    for my it doesnt have removable drive f it just savs cannon and it doesnt come up when i use the software what should i do


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