I know this topic has been covered previously, but I haven't seen exactly my problem yet.
The deal is, I was importing (copying, not totally moving) pictures from a wedding into my photo editing program. They didn't go where I wanted them to go, so I deleted them to try again. They deleted from the album and from the memory card! Pics don't move from the memory card to the program when I'm using it, so I don't know what happened.
I have not taken any new photos on the memory card.
I used CardRecovery, Recuva, and Pandora Recovery tools to recover these pictures. All the pictures show up again, to an extent. Some are totally fine, while all the others have some degree of greyness running through them. Some are totally obscured by this grey area. The bizarre thing is that when the folder is first opened that holds the newly recovered photos, they ALL look normal at first. I can see ALL of the pictures just fine; but as the pictures fully open, the pictures become obscured right before my eyes by the grey areas!
What is going on? If I can see all the of the pictures at the beginning, then I KNOW the information is there; it just won't reveal it to me.
The grey areas are in the same areas on the same pictures using all three programs.
Is there any way to fully recover these pictures?
To see an example, look at my photo dated 20 August, 2011.
Thank you for any and all advice!
Robyn
Given you're seeing them as thumbnails, I'll assume you've shot in JPG mode - JPGs store the thumbnails inside the image file as physically separate data to the main image, a tiny little copy, so the operating system can read this and generate thumbnails more quickly than scanning the entire image and downsampling.
So, it is entirely possible for the very small portion of file data containing the thumbnail to be left unscathed, but some portion of the full size image itself to have gone missing, leaving you with a working thumbnail but a broken image overall, sadly.
Oh, and, it's not a problem I've ever looked into "solving". As the missing data could be *anything*, I'm not sure how any recovery program could figure it out (depending what portion is missing, of course. If it's just one pixel's worth of data throwing off the encoding sequence then that *might* be fixable, but if it's a huge chunk of data simply vanished or corrupted, then you're probably shot).
I thought about the recycle bin already, because that also made sense that they'd be there. But they weren't. I wonder, though, if they are in a temporary folder in my computer somewhere? Hmm...
@2thgirl - if you deleted them, and they AREN"T in your recycle bin, you can still use software to recover them.
They are still physically located on the hard drive. When you delete them, you aren't really removing them from the drive, the operating system will just act as though they aren't there. The particular portion of the drives platter where the info was stored can now be used to save other things.
I'm not sure if that made sense. Perhaps someone can explain it better.
Thanks everyone for your tips and advice. my 18 year old son said "Have you looked in the 'recently changed' file?" I said, "UH, no...." And there they were!!!!! I looked through each and every file in the recycle bin, tried 3 different file restoring programs, and there they were in "recently changed". UGH!! Glad to have them back, tho!!
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So, it is entirely possible for the very small portion of file data containing the thumbnail to be left unscathed, but some portion of the full size image itself to have gone missing, leaving you with a working thumbnail but a broken image overall, sadly.
Oh, and, it's not a problem I've ever looked into "solving". As the missing data could be *anything*, I'm not sure how any recovery program could figure it out (depending what portion is missing, of course. If it's just one pixel's worth of data throwing off the encoding sequence then that *might* be fixable, but if it's a huge chunk of data simply vanished or corrupted, then you're probably shot).
http://www.recoverdeletedpictures.com/
They are still physically located on the hard drive. When you delete them, you aren't really removing them from the drive, the operating system will just act as though they aren't there. The particular portion of the drives platter where the info was stored can now be used to save other things.
I'm not sure if that made sense. Perhaps someone can explain it better.
helps