Recover Photos from XD card - Olympus camera
So, my girlfriend's mum was around the other day for my OH's birthday - had taken a load of photos for the day and also had all of her photos from seeing Andy Murray play at Wimbledon during the Olympics. My OH asked if we could download the photos before she left - she was dubious since she hadn't had a chance to upload them to her own computer, but agreed when I assured her there would be no issues. She uses an older Olympus camera (forget the model just now, SP-510 I think) and we plugged the XD card into a card reader attached to my Mac.
It found 510 photos which seemed too many, and when it tried to download them, iPhoto just read them all and said there was problems getting them. I then tried to do a manual copy and this just took ages, copying one photo after about 5 minutes. We gave up, put the card back in the camera and suddenly, the camera could only see about 20 photos. Assuming she's done something wrong, I take a look and sure enough, only 20 photos on the card.
I'm now pretty nervous, so I've taken the card and assured her I'll get the photos off. I've tried the actual Olympus software recommended for the camera and this sees nothing, I've tried a couple of recovery bits of software (CardRecovery and Photo Rescue) and, although they see the 372 JPEG images, they say they're all corrupted (though I haven't yet extracted them to the PC since they charge you for this and I don't want to pay just to get a load of corrupt JPEGs).
Have any of you budding photographers out there seen something like this before and have any potential solutions? I really don't want to have to tell her I've lost all her photos...
How big's the card?
Hi Professor
I've used Recuva with varying levels of success before, it may not get everything back but could be worth a try...
How big's the card?
2 GB
Right, everything I found has a 1GB limit so you'd end up paying. I like Streamer's Recuva's use of the word 'free'...
I'd be very surprised if it's irrecoverable btw.
IIRC there's no limit on the size of the disk you're trying to recover though not all of the photos it found were complete and some of the filenames were a bit strange.
Good luck if you try it though, how you get them back!
I use disk drill media recovery. Don't panic, if you haven't take any new images the data is probably still there.
Thanks guys - I'm giving Recuva a try at the moment - not looking good so far - can't find any picture files, but has found 511 "other files". Will try Disk Drill if this doesn't get anywhere.
I'm guessing it will be recoverable, it's just how much they might cost if they need to go to a specialist 
I just don't get what caused the issue in the first place - would it have been the Mac? It's always been okay with SD cards which plug direct into the Mac Mini, but I've never tried an XD card before.
How old is the card? It could be age, they do have a finite life. Number one cause is not periodically formatting the card in camera to keep the file structure healthy. It can also cause failures if the card has been formatted either on a computer or a different camera. When I worked in a camera shop a few years back it was always XD going wrong, don't trust them.
The data will still be there, its just the cards file structure/table of contents will be damaged.
Brand new card, formatted in the camera. Apparently they're quite hard to get hold of now so she bought a couple. I wondered whether it might be a dodgy card, but of course that's now just going to look like I'm trying to shift blame from me, so don't want to go down that route...!
Recuva has picked up the 511 files the Mac was seeing in the first place - it looks like loads of these are duplicates (same file name and size) and there is in fact only 30 individual files on there which is way less than there should be. These are all showing up as corrupt JPGs and can't be opened.
The card recovery software was actually picking up 372 individual files which makes me think I need to stuck to the specialist camera card software rather than generic file recovery software?
Don't give up til you've tried Jessops. They might be able to rescue the corrupt files (or at least some of them) or recommend somewhere which can. The lesson to be learned, which I too learned the hard way several years ago, is empty your card frequently.
Well, no luck with any of the recovery software I've tried so far (including all the ones mentioned above), so yes, looks likes it's a trip to Jessops to see what they can do for us.
Thanks all!
Hi Prof
had similar experience with ma-in-law's trip to Australia photos. Managed to get all but three of them back - think the program I used was File Recover Pro which was a paid for utility. Will check tonight when I get home and see if I can still find the details.
Best of luck
Hi Prof
had similar experience with ma-in-law's trip to Australia photos. Managed to get all but three of them back - think the program I used was File Recover Pro which was a paid for utility. Will check tonight when I get home and see if I can still find the details.
That would be great - cheers
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