A Photographer's Worst Nightmare-- and How to Fix It

[ Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post, and any links contained in this article are not paid or affiliate links. I have simply included them so that you may check out the product for yourself.]

Anyone who has ever used a digital camera and stored their images on their desktop PC has been there.

You are casually browsing through or offloading some images, from a disc or memory card, or maybe you have opened a folder full of treasured photos intending to do some editing or select some to copy to a thumb drive for printing out at the local kiosk, when.....BAM! They have all suddenly DISAPPEARED from the file, gone into who-knows-what digital Interwebs computer hinterlands, nowhere to be found, and never to be seen again.

Oh, the humanity! This is a heart-wrenching crisis, and a photographer's nightmare.

This very thing happened to me a few weeks ago, while saving some images to a file for a blog post (in fact, the ones for my recent "California Dreamin' " post, seen here). It wasn't so much that it was a crisis to the completion of the article, as it was that these were beloved family photos taken, most taken between 2003 and 2005, in places and a time that I could never revisit. The photos weren't stored or backed up anywhere else (dummy me, because I have a great 1T WD My Book external hard drive sitting right here at my desktop "studio" ). The disc I had been gleaning photos from had been in use during the project for a couple of days as I came and went, and suddenly, I opened it up to resume work, and they were GONE. Not one image on the disc to be found. It was a sickening feeling.

However, having been through this before with the crash of an ancient Dell PC several years back, I knew immediately I needed to find a good file recovery program. Cheapskate that I am, I couldn't buy a recovery CD brand new, and felt as though I really didn't have time for that anyway, so I proceeded to hunt down a free recovery program online to use right away.

Now, that earlier episode back in 2007 or '08 with the old Dell taught me something-- don't go using the first "recovery program" you find. The one I used back then finally did recover some of my "lost" images back then, but the ones it did recover came back as thumbnails. Not only that, I was at the time not as tech savvy as I would have liked to be, and didn't even have a great photo editing program that might assist in restoring them to a decent 5x7 or 8x10 size.

Well, I got 'em back alright, but as useless thumbnails. Kinda like something out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when Mike Teavee starts messing with the television film equipment, much against Mr. Wonka's instructions, and winds up shrunken down to a couple of inches. Sure, the Oompa Loompas were able to stretch him out to a thinner, somewhat taller version with a similarity to his former self. But this wasn't going to work for my "recovered" images that day.

Lesson learned, flash forward to January 2018.

This time, I was armed with a good search engine, a rockin' custom built desktop with massive memory, running Windows 10, Opera browser (and I love it!), three great photo editing programs, and more Internet savvy than that which I possessed back in 2007. I began to search for a reliable file recovery program online that was free. I know, a lot of times "free" means it's either bundled with hidden digital nasties or it is going to work for the first five photos, and quit working until you pay for services rendered. But that day, I found a program I was really happy with in the end, and I want to share that with you. The name of this program is DiskDigger®, and it did just what was advertised!

DiskDigger® is a tool that undeletes and recovers lost files from your hard drive, memory cards, USB flash drive. It is compatible with Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux. Here is what their website has to say about the application:

"But what's the catch?" you ask. Well, click here for Part 2 of my article, and read on for more about DiskDigger® !