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A very important type of data recovery is to recover photos, typically from a camera memory chip.  Failures can happen for several reasons, but the most common for camera memory chips is corruption when the chip is transferred to a PC for reading.  It is very common for critical FAT information to be overwritten, or corrupted.

Photo file names

It is fortunate that photos do not require a file name to be useful, and the majority of users just rely on the sequential name the camera allocates to each picture. It is always best to try and read the memory chip logically, and so repairing the FAT and control information may be required, or alternatively, just an Image raw read will recover photos.  In both cases, it is possible that a photo may have been created in multiple fragments, and this needs to be solved.  The other reason for recovery is due to accidental deletion.  Solutions to all these problems are described below. 

Photo Wizard

The easiest recovery solution is to use the Wizard function.  The wizard will analyse the memory chip and determine the best way to recover the photos.  When in the recovery procedure, thumbnails of photos will be displayed to give confidence that recovery is possible and progressing.  For the demo, the thumbnails will be displayed, but no photos are actually saved.

Raw recovery and data carving

Use the data carving routine and this will find all JPEGs, and save them in a jpeg directory.  To assist with disks that have thousands of jpegs, the directory is limited to 5,000 images until a new directory is created.  To help with identifying images, when ever possible, CnW will add the photo date and camera to the file name, along with a unique incrementing number.