Dave's Favorites: Recover Lost Pictures With ImageRecall

Have you ever accidentally deleted a slew of pictures from a memory card before you transferred them to the PC? Or formatted a card in the camera, only to realize that your vacation pictures were still on board? That's the stuff that nightmares are made of. Fortunately, FlashFixers' ImageRecall ($40) is on hand to save you from yourself.

Like the cover of Douglas Adams' famous novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ImageRecall's box bears the words "Don't Panic" in large, soothing script. And that's good advice. In testing, this program effortlessly allowed me to recover digital images and audio files from a wide array of memory cards, giving me the confidence to trust ImageRecall for those times when I'll genuinely need it.

In Video: How to Recover Photos Deleted From Your Camera

The program's interface is simplicity itself. One click starts the recovery process, and you can direct the program to work its magic on any drive letter connected to your PC. Recovered images are relocated to a folder on your PC, and you can write those images to CD if you wish. ImageRecall can also securely erase a memory card, rendering the data unrecoverable, or test a card for errors.

Since ImageRecall can retrieve lost or damaged images from any drive letter, it isn't limited to memory cards. I successfully used it on a removable hard disk and on a USB-connected digital camera with internal memory. It cannot help you if your memory card has genuinely failed, though. I futilely tried recovering data from a dead 256MB CompactFlash card, for instance. But if you use the program to recover deleted or corrupted images, it works like a champ.