This weekend my son finally decided to do something with the photos he'd taken on his digital camera over the last holiday - but when he went to import them into iPhoto, there was nothing on the storage card! Somehow they'd been deleted.

He has an Olympus digital camera which stores pictures on an SD (Secure Digital) flash memory card. When you plug the camera into the Mac via USB cable, it mounts the volume on the desktop, and iPhoto launches and imports the images on the card. The images in the camera are stored in .jpg format.

I downloaded the freeware Exif Untrasher utility. It creates a clone disk image of the flash card on the desktop, then scavenges it for content. It found and recovered all 165 images and copied them to a designated folder. It takes a while to make the byte-by-byte clone in the first instance (and the bigger the flash card, the longer it will take), but it was worth the wait to retrieve the 'lost' images.

At the moment, Exif Untrasher only supports JPEG file format, so if your camera stores images in a different format, such as RAW there are similar commercial utilities available, such as Prosoft's Picture Rescue which will cover a wider range of file formats.

Tags: Data Recovery, Freeware