Cards, sticks and the drives photographs live on
Stop using the card. That instruction comes before every other one on this page. Deleting takes away an index entry and no more; a camera format writes a new empty index above the old; and a card the camera refuses is very often in perfect condition once a reader that behaves properly sees it. In each case the frames themselves are still sitting where the camera put them, and they stay there until something new is written on top. Cards and sticks start at £250 + VAT, a drive at £300 + VAT, the figure written down after a free look, and most jobs run two or three working days. Below you will find what a free download really returns, why a 50MB frame can come home a tenth of that size, and how one is rebuilt whole. Cards, sticks, external drives and complete computers reach us from London, Hackney, Wandsworth and Richmond. No phones.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A folder deleted in error | Only the directory entry goes. The picture is still lying where the camera put it, readable, until something fresh covers it | Take the card out and leave it be |
| The camera was asked to format | A blank index is written above the old, and the pictures below it are normally intact | Good chances, if you stopped shooting |
| 'Memory card error', and an invitation to reformat | A damaged index; the pictures underneath are usually untouched | Decline that offer every single time |
| Files came back, and not one will open | Screen previews, or the first piece of each frame, is what you have there | The complete frames are very likely still on it |
| Colour banding in a RAW, or grey along its lower edge | Either it was recorded across more than one run, or part of it has since been written over | Put back together to the maker's layout |
| A video clip that will not play | A single 4K clip breaks into far more pieces than any still | Rejoined on true frame boundaries |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
Your card is copied sector by sector before anything else is done, and every step afterwards runs against that copy. The original travels home exactly as it arrived.
Repair the table and it all returns arranged as you kept it — file names, the folder tree, and the date the camera wrote on each. Where repair is impossible, carving takes its place: every format is read against the documentation its maker issued, and a whole RAW is assembled out of however many separate runs held it. Handing back a preview is not a result.
No job goes out until every frame that came back has been opened full size on a monitor and looked at by somebody. A count in a report settles nothing. The picture on the screen settles it.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.
What the card does next decides the job: set it aside the moment you notice, and the position is good. Keep working on it and every new exposure needs somewhere to go, frequently the very frames you hoped to recover. Neither stopping nor the look costs anything. Cards and sticks sit at £250 + VAT, a drive at £300 + VAT, both put in writing, and most jobs here bring no invoice unless the pictures come back.
Since the wedding the card had been left alone — no new frames, nothing written to it at all — and that is why the copy lifted off so cleanly. Free software had already had a go and turned out six hundred thumbnails, none of them fit to print. Rebuilding every CR3 from the pieces it lay scattered in returned all 640 at full size.
It depends what you shot. A JPEG off a card that went straight into a drawer, often enough; RAW or video, not really. These programs report a find for anything shaped like a picture, and the thumbnail sitting within a frame is exactly that shape, so the count climbs while your folder fills with 5MB offcuts. Copy the card first, then measure what came out against what one real frame from that body should weigh.
Almost always one of two things. Either the preview was pulled out of the RAW and the frame itself abandoned, or the first piece only was taken of a picture written in several runs, and the tool stopped at the gap. In both cases the sensor data is normally still on the card. Read the frame according to the layout its maker published and it comes back together, so long as nothing has been written into that space since.
Usually not. What a format does is lay a fresh, empty directory above the old one, while the pictures stay in the places they were first put. Put the card away at that moment and the position is good. Each frame taken afterwards eats further in.
No. This lab does not work on handsets or tablets, and there is no exception to it. What we can take is the place the pictures were copied to: a card, an external drive, a laptop, or the HEIC folder a computer makes for itself the first time a handset is connected. Send one of those in and there is something to work with. Hold on to the phone — and better to know now than once a parcel is in the post.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.