Recovering lost photos from a SmartMedia card

Aug 25, '03 08:28:00AM

Contributed by: Joe Mac

I went on vacation last weekend and filled up a 64mb SmartMedia card with pictures. I switched to another card to take some more pictures, and when I put the first card back in to import the photos into iPhoto ... the images were gone! I had the folks at my local camera store check the card to no avail - they told me that sometimes static electricity can "zap" a card when you insert or remove it.

After a little Google searching, I found a product called PhotoRescue. It's basically a disk utility with an OS X version that can find photo files on various media cards. I ran the program and voila -- there were my photos! In a matter of minutes, I was able to save them all to disk and import them into iPhoto with no problems. I suspect that other disk utilities may have been able to perform the same task, but I don't have one installed.

This is hopefully not a program anyone will need to use often - but it sure is nice to know it's there!

[robg adds: PhotoRescue is commercial software, but it has a free "demo mode" that will show you anything that may be recoverable from the card ... so you can try before you buy.]

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