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Sometimes it’s just too easy to delete photo files on your digital camera. Maybe because your camera’s designers wanted an easy way to delete photos while they were testing the design. One or two button presses and that third rate photo has disappeared. Problem is, that means it’s a bit too easy to remove a photo instead of preserving it, for later transfer to your PC or your Flickr account. or even worse, you’ve formatted your whole memory card. Blast!

If the file was on your PC you’d likely go into the recycle bin and resurrect the accidentally deleted photo.

Unfortunately, you can’t normally do the same on your digital camera. Does this problem mean that the photos you took so much time taking are now just digital dust?

Luckily, the answer to that question is “no”.

But you need to be careful. The memory card in your camera is quite a lot like the system on your PC’s disk drive. The available files in the menu are ones that you haven’t deleted. But the filing system is lazy and hasn’t really deleted the file yet. What it’s actually done is marked the “deleted” photo’s space as ready to re-use..

Which means if you’ve deleted a photo in error, stop doing anything with your camera before you’ve done your best to retrieve your lost work of art.

As you’ve guessed, you’re not the first person to press the wrong button. So there’s some software you can use to help.

It’s as simple as hooking up your camera to your computer as you’d normally do. Then follow a few simple, step by step instructions. You can see the software in action here.

The photo un-delete program works to retrieve individual photos, complete memory cards (for instance, if you’ve accidentally formatted your memory card) and has a high success rate even if your photo memory card has become damaged.

That’s all it takes to recover all your precious photos from your camera.

You can download this easy to use photo recovery sofware here.