Digital camera accessories

[Laurence]

While on a lovely vacation in Alaska, I accidentally deleted all the photos I had taken so far on my 256MB SD card.  I was trying to delete a single movie file, the camera asked me if I wanted to delete "All Frames" and I stupidly thought that meant all the frames from that movie, clicked yes, felt sick to my stomach as it took 3 or 4 minutes to comply, and sure enough, all my pictures were deleted.

I removed the card, replaced it with another card and took the rest of our photos on it, in hopes of finding software that could recover the lost photos.  And I did - I ended up using two different pieces of free software, VAIOSoft's "Recovery Manager" and "PC Inspector Smart Recovery".  They both seem to have been successful at recovering my JPG files (YES!) ... but I had a handful of short movie files (.MOV) that were recovered as .JPG files - they can be viewed as a single image, but they are much larger than the normal .JPG images.  I've tried opening them with QuickTime or Windows Media Player (I'm on Windows XP), and I've tried just changing their filename to .MOV, but nothing has worked so far to recover my moving video.  

I notice that when I shoot a movie and DON'T syupidly delete it, that the result is a .MOV file AND a .THM file with the same filename, but in the files I've recovered from the deleted SD card, there is only a large .JPG file.

My camera is a Konica/Minolta Dimage X50 (happy with it when it doesn't hypnotize me and make me do stupid things).

Does anyone know how to restore my video files?  I don't want to spend $30 or $40 for software, since the still photos were my main concern and I seem to have recovered those, but I would like to get the video I shot of a glacier calving icebergs into the ocean.

Two related questions:  on the photos I recovered, the EXIF data is still there, but of course the file creation dates are now set to today's date instead of the date when the photo was taken.  Is there a utility out there that can take a folder full of photos and convert their creation dates to the dates specified in the EXIF data?

Thanks for any assistance you can provide

[ShutterbugGail]

Hi Laurence and welcome to the Q&A Board,

I recently lost over 500 mb of images and video. I first tried a free photo rescue program, but it only recovers images (eg. jpeg, tiff). I then tried Photo Rescue and recovered ALL my images plus seven video files. Two videos were corrupted but the other five are perfect.  Unfortunately, it is not free.

Anyway, you can learn more about it here:

http://www.digicamhelp.com/digital-photo-recovery-and-rescue/index.htm

Do a net search for Photo (or Video) recovery, and see what you come up with.

I was trying to delete a single movie file, the camera asked me if I wanted to delete "All Frames" and I stupidly thought that meant all the frames from that movie, clicked yes, felt sick to my stomach as it took 3 or 4 minutes to comply

I know the sinking stomach feeling. To be honest, though, I don't think you were stupid. The one who was stupid was the programmer who didn't use easily understood terminology! I would have understood "All Frames" to mean exactly as you did.

a .MOV file AND a .THM file with the same filename,

I've recently been told that the .thm file is used to give a visual picture of a video if you play it back on a television.

Does anyone know how to restore my video files?  I don't want to spend $30 or $40 for software,

Why not see if a friend has an image recovery program. or maybe a local camera shop can help you out.

Is there a utility out there that can take a folder full of photos and convert their creation dates to the dates specified in the EXIF data?

Try the free utility called Irfanview.  www.irfanview.com

Hopefully you'll recover your videos; if so, let us know what utility was used.

Alaska is awesome, isn't it!

[Laurence]

Thanks for the reply Gail!  I still haven't found a way to restore my videos, but I'll keep poking around to see if a free method presents itself.  

Wait ... check that ... after I started typing this I decided to download the demo version of PhotoRescue just to see if it could detect my videos, and guess what?  It recovers them just fine!  It only prevents you from recovering JPG's (which I've already done) but it allows the recovery of .MOV files to a directory on my hard drive.  It didn't find the .THM files, but I don't think I care about that too much.  So double thanks!

I wasn't able to figure out how to make IRFRANVIEW batch-convert my files to reset the create date to the EXIF date, but I found another program to do the trick: "PhotoLine 32" has a demo version that works for 30 days before you have to purchase it, and it did what I needed.  It looks like I'll be able to use IRFRANVIEW for other things though.

Thanks for all your help,
-Laurence

[ShutterbugGail]

What a great discovery! So glad you got your videos back! Thanks so much for sharing. The info will be helpful to others.