Recently, due to a combination of very poor user interface, and momentary insanity, while meaning to delete one picture on an almost full flash (SmartMedia) card, I recently deleted all the digital picture files on the card. Once I discovered my mistake, I compounded it by continuing to take photos, assuming that the ones I had deleted were irrecoverable and weren't important anyway. Later that day I was informed in no uncertain terms that the pictures I had deleted were important, and that I should make all efforts possible to recover them.
So later that night I sat up with Google and downloaded and tried a number of file recovery programs. A lot of the programs I tried were totally useless. File Scavenger V2, File Recover, Digital Picture Recovery, PC Inspector File Smart Recovery couldn't find any of the deleted files. PC Inspector File Recovery crashed when I ran it. Plus, the people who make the PC Inspector programs started spamming me about their products. I found one that looked promising, PhotoRescue, that showed me thumbnails of the missing photos, and promised that if I bought the program it could recover the full files, or my money back. That seemed reasonable enough and I was prepared to buy it for $29 if none of the others worked.
However, the clear winner at photo file recovery was a program called Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery. I downloaded the program, checked it for viruses, ran it, and it recovered my files and put them on my hard disk. It has an exceedingly simple user interface. Somewhat disconcertingly for my geeky soul, there are no options to configure or choices to make. I just started the program, told it where to save the images it recovered, pointed it at the card, and it did its stuff. In my case, it worked flawlessly and recovered 155 images, including 22 files that I had deleted and that other programs said didn't exist. It made someone in my family very happy. Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery is the best program that I have found for recovering photos files deleted from flash cards. As a bonus, it is freeware, released by a Russian programmer as a way of promoting his corporate data recovery software. I hope he succeeds. Very Highly Recommended.
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