Digital Images and Accidents!

A couple days ago I was meeting with a potential wedding client. She was telling me about how she had accidentally deleted a couple images she had needed. Anyway, this is a long way of saying the following is what you do if you screw up with digital! This is what I recommend for everyone using a digital camera to keep your photographs from being lost:

1. Never delete images in the camera. It is just too easy to delete something that you wanted, or accidentally hit delete all instead of deleting just one image.
2. Download the entire card onto your computer.
3. Backup your images immediately everytime you download.
4. THEN, go through them and delete the photographs you don't want.
5. Using this method if you accidentally delete one or all of them, they are in your wastebasket on your computer, or, if worst comes to worst, you can go to your backup.
6. Once this is done, format your card. Formatting your card rather than deleting all the images gets rid of the clutter on the card and allows it to perform better.

If you do accidentally delete something on the card, format your card, or have something catastrophic happen with the camera (the camera starts freaking out), stop taking photos! The photographs may still be recoverable as long as you don't keep taking photographs. When you delete a photograph or format your card, the images are still there! They will continue to be on your card until you take more photographs and the data in that sector is written over. This is just like your computer hard drive. Okay, now you've come back to your computer with your card that you believe you've lost images. What do you do now? Try PhotoRescue. It is a software program that can recover that information that you tried to delete! I hope this helps someone. Let me know if there is a question you want answered!