Maddie’s third birthday party was today. After she went to bed, we uploaded all our pictures from our Canon into iPhoto on our MacBook, then selected the ones we liked best for upload to Flickr. Nothing seemed to happen—there was no network traffic, and nothing was showing up in my Flickr photostream—so I quick iPhoto and restarted. Guess what? All of the pictures had disappeared. They weren’t in the iPhoto album, they weren’t in the Flickr upload area, they were just… plain… gone. And of course, I’d clicked “delete from camera” when the upload from the Canon finished. And of course, what with it being an Apple product and all, iPhoto 8.1 doesn’t save photos as plain files on disk for me to try to recover the old-fashioned way. I’m pretty angry with myself right now, but even angrier at Apple.
Couple of things to try to get the photos off of the card:
- http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec (free)
- http://echoone.com/filejuicer/ (payware, though you can run a test to see what it can recover before paying)
iPhoto does save photos as plain files, they are just hidden under the package structure. Commonly, you can find them in:
/Users//Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals
@Damian Thanks for the quick reply, but two questions:
1. How do I get PhotoRec to examine the camera that’s plugged into the MacBook? When I run it, all it seems is the Mac’s hard drive.
2. ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals only has four .jpg files, all from the last import (a month ago, which seemed to work smoothly). The ~/Pictures/iPhoto LibraryiPhotoMain.db file shows a last update timestamp at the time I was uploading. Any way to dig things out of there other than iPhoto (which is still showing nothing from today).
Greg,
I had the same problem back in January. After I’d calmed down from imagining the damage I would do to anyone in the iPhoto dev team if I could get hold of them, I figured out a solution.
First you need to mount the camera memory card as a disk. This doesn’t seem to happen if you plug the camera in directly, but does if you use a card reader (I have one you can borrow if you wish).
Then I bought a licence for Stellar Phoenix ($99, but compared to the value of photos of our kids, well worth it)
Stellar found all the deleted photos on the card, and copied them all to the harddrive for me. Problem solved, several hours of panic wasted.
Instead of getting a card reader, you may also be able to configure your camera to act as a mass/USB storage device/USB MSC by going through your camera’s settings. It sounds like your camera is configured as a PTP device, currently.
Good luck with the data recovery.