Tech Exposures

Digital Camera Photos Corrupted or Unreadable
We’ve all dreaded it. You take hundreds of photos with your digital camera at your daughter’s birthday party or a friend’s wedding, and when you plug in the Compact Flash, or SD card into your reader, and to your dismay the photos are missing or unreadable due to corruption. A friend of mine lost all of his wedding photos since his high-priced wedding photographer corrupted the only CF card that he used to shoot the event. (The photographer should have been shot for only using one card, but that’s a different subject)… He tossed the card after unsuccessfully trying to recover the files. With the technique described below, perhaps he could have saved the images on that card. You do not have to download software to do this procedure.

Don’t throw out that digital card, help is on the way!
With these simple steps you can retrieve all the images from your card. The file images are there, without getting too technical, the problem is usually with the file system on the card, not the image files themselves.

Why did it happen?
Many times the corruption is caused by your digital camera being able to process information faster than the card. The buffer fills up, you as a photo enthusiast keep taking more photos, and then the card misses some info needed to store a file in the packets coming. Usually, the photo taken when the corruption happened will be lost, but all the other files can be retrieved using the steps described here.

How to restore the card in these easy steps

The next time your SD or CF card corrupts (yes, there will be a next time, it happens…), remember not to panic. The key is to recover the corrupted files before trying to write to the card again. Do not take any more photos, do not try to delete photos. First, use the method below to retrieve the corrupted images.  The steps listed below work in Windows XP.  I’m sure they will work in Vista (but I don’t use Vista , and I’ve had success in Linux as well.

Step 1 Pop the card into a card-reader and attach to your computer.  Find that drive on Windows Explorer, put the right mouse over it and click on Properties

Step 2 Make sure you are looking at the drive letter of the card and not your hard drive (not C:).  Click on the Tools tab, and then click on the “Check Now” under the error-checking section.

Step 3 A dialog box like this should pop-up.  Check both boxes to detect and fix system errors on your digital card (notice the pop-up box tells you in the title what drive it will be scanning).

Step 4 Depending on the size of the Digital card this step can take a minute or longer.  After the process is complete.  Go to your Windows Explorer and make sure you can view hidden files on your drive (click on the radio button “Show hidden files and folders” as in the image.  You should be able to see a bunch of files with crazy names in that drive that you didn’t see before.  Copy these files over to a directory on your computer’s hard drive and change their names and file extension to the appropriate file type that the files were saved in on your camera.  For example, if your camera usually shoots jpg files, then copy the file names over and rename them as 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc…

You should now be able to see the photos using your usual image viewer.

Disclaimer – This technique presented here is for informational purposes only.  There are no guarantees or warranties implied on this method or any other information presented here.  It has worked for me, try at your own risk!