Friends of my wife and I recently had their first child. They took a dozen or so pictures in the hospital and then took a few more at home. My friend’s mother brought her camera over with a printer dock and they were trying to print the pictures off. Long story short, the card got formatted moving it between cameras.

I told my friends not to use the card, I’ll look for a program which will bring the pictures back. While I was looking for a program they called where they bought the camera from, and they told them there is no way to get the pictures back if the card was formatted. They were upset at what they were told,  but since others had taken pictures and they figured they weren’t getting these ones back so they started to take pictures again.

My wife told me what they were told from the camera store, so I called them said don’t take any more pictures and I’ll come over with a couple of programs I found which will recover photos from formatted cards. The two programs I found were CardRecovery v3.00 and PC Inspector SmartRecovery. CardRecovery has a nice interface, will show you what photos it can recover but costs about $40.00 to save anything. SmartRecovery was free so I ended up using it. I was able to recover all the formatted pictures even though they started taking pictures again.

Needless to say the new parents are very happy to have the photos back.