Web Observatory

oday I experienced what is known to be the “Fix-it-guy” mentality. Since my friends know I’m into computers and the digital lifestyle, they automatically assume that I know how to fix either their gadgets or their PC’s. They often use me as their personal Technician. Although I know how to tinker stuff, I don’t do it professionally and I do it for my personal needs.

Just a few months back I even got stressed out by a friend trying to harass me to install a dial-up connection for his fathers all new PC… What they forgot to actually put in is the actual telephone line, see how dependent people are when there’s an easy way to just get your friends to do stuff for you.

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Well anyway, the point of interest here is that one of my closest woman friend is an avid amateur, self-proclaimed “professional” photographer. She bought a high-end DSLR camera and never managed to read the manual, but use it as a point-and-shoot. She told me that what sold it is that it came with a portable photo-printer, yipeee!!! I sent her some e-books on photography and subscribed her to photography tutorial sites mailing lists, she actually started studying about it and sometimes ask me for a photography trip where she’ll bring my favorite foods just to entice me. To cut the long story short, today we took a trip and had several nice shots, she was bragging how good her framing was as opposed to mine, so we decided to plug our cameras on the notebook PC to review our sort of artwork. First was mine, “pretty good, ” she said. Then it was her turn, when shes about to plug in the camera to function as card reader, the LCD displays Format Error.

Heart-broken she goes puppy-eyes at me and says, “I bet you can fix this?”… and continues, “can you fix it for me? pretty please?”. Ah, I said “No Way!”, and her expression changed from a cute puppy-eyed vixen to an eye piercing tigress, so I said “Just kidding, I’ll give it a try.” I gave her no guarantees however. So I surfed up a storm finding the best cure and that’s where I found Art Plus Software’s PhotoRec.

Here is what I did:

Step One. Connected Card Reader to PC and Inserted the Memory Card from her Digital Camera. (You can just plug in your Camera too if you already installed the driver).

Step Two. Installed PhotoRec and Fire it up. You’ll instantly be greeted with a reassuring “Don’t Fret!” text on the programs Launch Screen. There is a disclaimer there that informs us this is not a fix-it-all solution. As digicams way of erasing picture files on your memory card is by simply chopping off the header information and not the actual data. This where PhotoRec uses it’s technology.

Step Three. Set the Drive and it’s Corresponding size. If your setup is completely normal, your cards info should appear in the media drop-down list. It’s imperative however that you set the correct memory size of your media.

Step Four. PhotoRec will then notify your where you would want to store the recovered images. I suggest making a new recovery folder somewhere on your desktop. Depending on the files itself, the recovered files filename sometimes get messed up.

Finally. It will start recovering the image files for you. The time will depend on the media size, sometimes you’ll be surprised that there are more photos recovered because of all the previous deletion you had to do…

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And by the way, Arr Plus Software have other tools too. So my friend was very happy about this, but was not happy how she took all the photos in preset exposure, the pictures looked washed out, then she looked at me again, I immediately said “No! , you won’t get me to photoshop that!”.