Accessing Inaccessible Photos using Photo Recovery

Last week, I accompanied my younger brother on the convocation ceremony of his college. Receiving the degree and sharing the time with old batch mates and faculty is one overwhelming experience. Since our parents had to go out of town due to some urgent work, we decided to click as many photos as we could, so we could share it with them. Particularly important were the ones in which he was accepting the degree wearing the ever-pervading black attire. But while clicking,
1 Good FriendImage by ahyang via Flickr
it never occurred to us, that we may even lose them. And we'll have to opt for photo recovery.

And so after clicking endlessly, when the ceremony got over, we went back home. On our way back, my brother sat back, trying to view the photos that I had clicked. But to his utter dismay, and later mine, the camera read:

“Memory card error. Memory card parameter error”

We were dumbfound. And on reaching home immediately connected the camera to our computer, but the data was inaccessible. My brother was heart-broken. When we got a call from our dad, he asked about the ceremony. And my brother told him everything, while blaming me for it. Our dad, a computer engineer told us that it had happened because the file system had corrupted. And it was owing to this that all the photos were inaccessible, but 'not completely lost'. His eyes gleamed on hearing this. But file system corruption was the worst case. However, he advised, we should try some simple methods to recover our photos, before using a photo recovery software. He suggested some simple trouble-shooting steps. We cleaned the card surface and re-inserted it, and then tried to access the card using a card reader. But nothing worked. So we had to format the card. And we learnt, photos are not lost after formatting. They simply become inaccessible.

This was followed by photo recovery using a read-only, yet very simple tool by stellar phoenix. But before this, we downloaded the demo version of some of the most popular photo recovery software. We downloaded Windows compatible demo version of one software, and with it, very soon we had the preview of all our photos which had been inaccessible fore so many hours. We thanked our dad, and saved all the photos on our computer, before he uploaded them on Flickr, Picasa, twitter, and his facebook accounts.

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