A few weeks ago I returned from a three-day pack trip in Yosemite with several hundred photographs on an 8GB compact flash card. As soon as I got home (yes, five minutes after midnight…) I popped the card into my firewire card reader and watched Adobe Bridge launch and present me with the screen for importing the files to my computer. I hit the appropriate buttons…

… and watched the program freeze.

Stuff happens. I relaunched and tried again – only to find that the card data had been corrupted. Not only did the Finder report that there was now a single mysterious 4GB file and not photos on the card, but inserting the card caused most applications I tried to run to freeze almost immediately.

A quick search led me to the PhotoRescue web site, from which I downloaded their “expert” version of PhotoRescue 2.1. I quickly installed the application and put the program to work analyzing the damaged card. It found hundreds of RAW files from my Canon 5D and all but two appeared to be OK.

PhotoRescue provides a rather unique method of online distribution. You dowload the program for free, apparently usually in the throes of panic over a bad memory card, and you run it. It does the card analysis and file location and shows you thumbnails of all the files that it can recover. (In my case this included not only this week’s photos, but others that remained on the card from previous use.) If the program finds salvageable files you can decide to purchase the full program (US$29) to copy them from the card to your computer, which is just what I did. I can’t think of a more fair approach to selling this software.

Before long I had transferred all of the RAW files from the recent shoot to my hard drive, made a backup of the files, and used ACR to open (and rename) the files. At this point I did discover damage to a couple of the recovered files, but the vast majority (all but two or three) had been fully salvaged and were ready for use.

Here is one shot that I would have lost without PhotoRescue.

Boulder, Lower Young Lake. Yosemite National Park, California. September 10, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

(Update 10/9/07: I later figured out that this problem was not caused by the card or the camera. It was the result of leaving an old firewire device plugged into a firewire hub that I had attached to a new computer – an incompatibility between the new computer and the old device led to the corruption.)