Recover deleted photos on a Mac for free!

Oops... someone deleted all the photos on the camera after our holiday instead of just one. It was Mr or Ms nobody. Fear not, because as long as you don't fill the camera with new photos the old ones will still be there - just hidden from the operating system.

Firstly you need a usb card reader so your computer can get direct access to the "drive". I bought a cheap one from Tescos here in Thailand for 140 baht (3 quid) that reads my large CF card and many others.

I downloaded a free demo of a program called PhotoRecovery for Mac by AppleXsoft that found my photos but wanted 50 bucks to give them to me. That gave me the confidence that they were indeed still accessible so I googled on the interweb a bit more and came up with this:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

It is a command line tool you can download or you can install it straight from the brilliant MacPorts by typing

sudo port install testdisk



TestDisk is the package that contains the photorec command.

Now type "photorec" and the UI kicks in to guide you through the process of selecting the drive etc.

I chose the drive by guessing from its size - my card was 1GB so I chose the 991 MB option

Then I had to guess a filesystem type - I chose EFI for lack of a better idea.

Then I chose where to save the files and the program started doing its thing. Like so:

and low and behold the damn thing worked like a charm and spat out all my deleted photos into the folder I chose.

Sing hallelujah!