Digital camera accessories

[danmc13]

I'm trying to get back a single picture.  Here's what happened.  I have an olympus camera with a 512mb xD picture card, and wanted to save a single picture from the card to my computer.  Instead of using windows to move the file to my hard drive I instead opened the picture into microsoft photo editor, then saved it to a folder on my hard drive.  I did this because microsoft photo editor compresses the pictures much more when it saves them, reducing file size without quality suffering.  But for some reason stupid microsoft photo editor sometimes doesn't save pictures in the directory you select but automatically saves them in my windows/temp internet files/ directory instead.  Well it did that without me noticing, so I then used windows to delete the file off my xD card.  When I went back to relocate the picture in the directory I thought I had saved it to it wasn't there.  I realized what happened and even went to my temporary internet files directory to locate the picture but it wasn't there either.  I have no idea why microsoft photo editor sometimes does that, or even what it actually does since i cant even find the picture that it supposedly saved anywhere on my hard drive.  But anyways, I would like to restore the picture back from my xD card.

I have downloaded a free photo recovery program and attempted to use it but the problem there is that it saves to my hard drive EVERY deleted picture that it finds and starting retrieving them from way way back.  I would have to retrieve gigabytes of data before it even got to the picture i want.  (maybe it doesnt retrieve them chronologically but at least potentially i would have to wait till it retrieved gigabytes of data, which i dont even have space for on my HD)

So are there any programs that can scan a card for pictures or at least just retrieve pictures starting from most recently deleted?

EDIT:  i just realized i said something stupid.  if i have a 512mb card it can't possibly recover any more than that.  the process just misled me by first retrieving pictures I took many months ago.  I have since taken gigabytes worth of pictures.  But obviously not every picture since then will be retrieved.  and i have at least 250 mb of pictures already on the card.  so i guess the process wont take that long and wont consume that much disk space afterall.  so disregard the post.  

or rather, let me ask another question.  does it matter whether i delete pictures using windows or should i only delete pictures using the camera itself?  i have windows ME by the way

[bdery]

Hi danmc and welcome!

first of all, the anwser to your direct question. You should always delete files, format the card, etc, with the camera. That's because doing this you ensure that the camera will operate to its best, that the card will me mapped by and for the camera, etc. You should also, from time to time, do a low level format to your card, because have you have found, a standard format does nothing more than delete the adress of the files in the FAT (file allocation table). The data is still there. Doing a low level format will reduce the chance of card corruption, something that seems to happen from time to time with xD cards.

Now, about your recovery. You are of course correct that you will not be able to recover more than what the card can hold. The reason why the software recovered older files is probably just that when you delete the files, the camera always starts writing the new ones from the same point. It basically goes back and forth over the same storage part of the card. If you shoot a full 512 MB then you will overwrite the whole card.

A good tip to avoid loosing data is to always COPY (not move) the files to a folder on your computer, make sure all the files are there, THEN if you want erase the data on the card. With digital it's easy to loose data forever.

Something else worth mentionning regarding your comment about better compression. You have to undestand that any compression makes you loose quality. It might not show at full-screen vieweing size, but if you print the image, or zoom in at 100%, you will see differences between a highly compressed file and one with a lower compression. In addition, each time you edit a file and save it, you increase the number of compression errors. So it's better, in general, to always use the best (lowest) compresion setting possible, because once you have compressed a file, you cannot go back and the data is lost. If you only plan to display the images on the web, it's less of a problem, but for printing, cropping, etc, the compression will degrade your image quality.

Basically, it's a choice between taking up more hard drive space, or loosing potential memories (I'm exagerating, given, you won't loose them, but you get the point).

[ShutterbugGail]

I just wanted to point out that not all digital cameras have a low level format option. Most have the following choices: delete/erase and format. Here is some information about the difference between erasing and formatting a card, and why you're able to recover some images but not others.

http://www.digicamhelp.com/erasing-and-formatting-digital-camera-memory-cards/index.htm

As an aside, the free image recovery programs are quite effective buy most do not recover video files. I've also found that the free programs may not recover as many individual files as a program you buy.