The flash card was not recognized later that day after connecting the digital camera to the Acer laptop. I then remembered an article that I wrote in 2006 about the file recovery software PC Inspector. A digital photo recovery spinoff called Smart Recovery was created by the same company and I decided to give it a try to see if it was able to recover the photos on the corrupt flash card.

The program is pretty easy to use as it only takes three steps to configure the process and start the scan of the flash card. The digital photo camera needs to be connected to the computer system before the program is started. This should assign a new drive letter to the digital camera which has to be selected in step 1.

A file extension for the photos has to be selected in step 2. This is set to jpg by default but can be changed to several camera specific formats. A download directory has to be specified in step 3. The photo recovery software will start the scan. It can either complete the task in a quick scan or perform a deep scan depending on the severity of the corruption. The deep scan will take a longer time but is more thorough and the only chance if the level of corruption is to severe.

The digital photo recovery software PC Inspector was able to restore and save all photos that have been taken and stored on the corrupt flash card. The only things left to do were to move and tag the pictures manually as this option was not available due to the corruption and to format the flash card so that it can be used again.

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The photo recovery software is compatible with every Windows operating system since Windows 95 and should work with all memory card types. Two of its biggest selling points are the ability to recover pictures from formatted memory cards and that it can even identify and work with cards that Windows detects as corrupted.

The portable software provides two recovery options. The first is to recovery images directly from the memory card while the second will create an image of the memory card on the computer which can be parsed for photos afterwards.

Memory cards can be accessed directly if they are visible as a logical drive in Windows. If that is not the case a memory card reader has to be used instead. The last step involves picking the image formats supported by the camera. Some users might be tempted to select all but this could lead to corrupted photos and is not advised. The easiest way is to look at previously saved images or the digital camera’s manual to find out the formats that it saves the photos in.

The photo recovery software supports currently the formats JPG, TIF, DNG, Canon CR2, Konica-Minolta MRW, Nikon NEF, Olympus ORF, Pentax PEF, Sony ARW, SRF and SR2 plus a few additional RAW formats that might not be supported fully but can be recovered nevertheless.

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The developers of the image recovery software have created a list of supported camera models which is probably a good point to start. The list also contains those models that were found to be not working with the software, so before you try check the list. You need to connect the camera to the computer or put the memory card that contained the pictures in a card reader that is connected to the computer running the image recovery software.

It’s then just the matter of selecting the correct camera model or media from the list of available ones. The software will then automatically scan the card and try to recover all information it can find. All images that are recovered will be stored on the hard drive in a location that you specify.

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