Digital Photo Disaster Averted With CardRaider.

What do you do when photos from Thanksgiving, Birthdays, and Christmas magically disappear from your digital camera?

Let your Mac rescue lost digital photos using CardRaider.

The scenario is surprisingly common. You shoot photos with that great new multi-megapixel digital camera and download to iPhoto on your Mac.

That’s easy, right? What happens when iPhoto can’t import the photos? That’s called “corruption” and happens often enough that it’s a pain.

Pain? Yes, because most Mac users don’t know what to do if the photos in their digital camera become corrupt.

For me, it’s happened twice just during the past holidays; once painful, once not at all thanks to a new Mac solution.

I took a few dozen photos over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend using my Canon digital camera with a compact flash card.

The card was an old CF card that had given me problems once before. I should have ditched it but didn’t. I didn’t download the photos to iPhoto but used the camera and card a week later for a birthday party.

Importing photos to iPhoto is a breeze until something goes wrong. In this case iPhoto didn’t recognize the compact flash card in the camera, hence no import of dozens of digital photos.

I took the card out of the camera and plugged it into my Firewire card reader. Guess what? Same problem. My Mac couldn’t read the photos.

At this point, I’m thinking, ”Uh oh. I’ve got to erase my compact flash card and start over. Or, just get a new card and forget those holiday photos.”

Then I remembered a review we did on Mac360 about rescuing digital photos from a card where the photos had become corrupt.

Don’t ask me why it happens, it just does. Not all memory cards or readers are created equal. I’m sure it has nothing to do with me, the photographer.

Before erasing the card I dropped an email to Bambi, Ron, and Kate and told them of my problem and asked for advice. Ron responded right away and said to check out Ecamm’s CardRaider.

What does it do? It detects lost photos on a memory card and restores them, not unsimilar to utilities which let you find lost or erased files on your Mac’s hard drive.

$20 is a cheap price to recover a couple of holidays worth of digital photos, but CardRaider let me try before the buy.

Simply put, CardRaider reads the files on your memory card and lets you recover the files with one click. It provides a detailed list of photos in a thumbnail format, and even found my Canon RAW images. JPGs are a snap.

The recovered photos are imported directly to iPhoto so you’re pretty much back where you started except for having lost all those precious digital photos to a corruption or accidental erase.

Your Mac may not see all the photos, erased, corrupt, or otherwise, that are still on a memory card. Ditto for your camera. But what’s lost is not always lost forever. CardRaider looks below the surface, finds and restores the photos you thought were gone.

I got back my photos and then decided to to another real world test. I shot a few dozen photos using my camera, my daughter, my husband, and my next door neighbor.

Then, right inside the camera, I used the format selection in the menu to erase all the photos. They’re gone, right? Not so. Erasing doesn’t actually erase.

CardRaider found the photos right away, completely intact, and quickly imported into iPhoto. As I looked around, I found other photo rescue solutions, but Ecamm’s CardRaider was the most Mac-like operation and found erased photos faster.

There’s one other feature that’s not given much consideration, but could be very handy if you share memory cards with other camera users-- permanent erase. CardRaider overwrites even erased photos so that cannot be recovered in the future-- or viewed by someone else using your memory card.

Have you had a digital photo disaster? Have you evere lost digital photos on a corrupt memory card? What did you do? Share your experience with other Mac360 readers in the Comments section below.

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