Recovering photos from corrupted memory cards

I've just spent most of an evening trying to find a program that will recover photos on a corrupted SD memory card.

I've trawled through a dozen or so promising-looking programs, with names like File Recovery Pro or CardRecovery Plus, or whatever.

Many/most discovered the 'lost' photos, but frustratingly, they were all demo versions that tantalisingly showed you thumbnails of the pictures and then wanted you to pay money to retrieve them. 

Fair enough, perhaps, except that it would be a distress purchase and the money involved wasn't worth the pictures.   One of them wanted $70 - what's that, £40?  I think file recovery should be built into the operating system.

To the point:  I've just discovered Digital Photo Recovery from Art Plus software, and it worked on my SD card.  It's a bit slow, but you can leave it running while you do something else.  And hey, it's free!

They do nag you for a suggested $10 donation before you leave their site, but at least they don't hold a gun to your head.  And $10 is the right amount to ask for something you shouldn't have to pay for in the first place. 

Update:  I just discovered PhotoRec, and that's free.  It's not even 'guiltyconscienceware' and there's a pretty picture to boot.

No doubt you'll now tell me of a third free photo recovery program, and they'll be like buses, coming along all at once.   But don't pay £30 to recover a few snaps, that's just extortion.

Comments

[mista]

glad you found photorec so useful, you should look into why it's free and about open source in general, it'll suprise you. wikipedia linux or open source software sometime. All the best.

[Paul Sladen]

If you're stuck again, grab an Ubuntu CD, boot that and:

sudo apt-get install recoverjpeg
recoverjpeg /dev/sdb

(and on Linux there any many more generic ones [eg. 'magicrecover'] which will search for anything recognisable).

[Simon]

I've successfully used the freeware 'PC Inspector' to recover files from duff eternal hard drives, although haven't tried it on flash memory. It of course all depends on how bad the corruption is. That's on evil Windows, of course... pictures are just files, so that may help generally.

[Maureen Davies]

Thanks for the link Andrew I have lost some photos I would like to recover so I will give it a try
Maureen