How to undelete pictures on your camera

First, shutterbug, do no harm

As long as you haven't used the camera after the pictures were deleted, there's a very good chance that you can get them all back. Likely as not, it won't cost a cent.
If you've deleted a picture or a bunch of pictures on your camera — whether by injudiciously hitting the "delete" key on the camera itself, by copying the pics to your PC and having the PC delete them as they were copied, or by any of a zillion other bonehead methods — you must start by doing nothing.
Don't take any more pictures with the camera. Don't try to use the camera's built-in menu. Don't reformat the hard drive. Just sit and chill while you figure out what to do next.

What really happens when you delete pics
When you delete a picture on a camera, you don't actually delete the picture.

Cameras use an ancient file-handling system known as FAT (short for File Allocation Table).

The FAT system used in cameras is very similar to the FAT system used in PCs, back in the days of DOS and early versions of Windows. FAT breaks up a memory card into fixed-size chunks. When you take a picture, the camera stores the image in enough unused chunks of memory to hold the file.

When you delete a picture, the file isn't erased. Instead, the area that the file occupied is marked as "unused" and becomes available to hold a new picture. The first character of the filename gets changed, too. But the file itself stays intact until the camera needs the room to store another picture.

That's why you shouldn't use the camera — more accurately, you shouldn't use the memory card that holds your deleted images — until you have a recovery plan sorted out. If you take the memory card out of the camera, don't put it back in the camera. Some cameras automatically stick stuff on the card every time it's inserted.

PC Inspector — how to undelete for free

There are hundreds of programs available on the Internet that claim to undelete lost pictures on a camera. Most of them cost $30, $40, or more. Before you shell out the bucks on an expensive package, take a look at a small, absolutely free alternative from a German company called Convar.

The program, called PC Inspector Smart Recovery, works almost every time, in my testing, although I did hit snags installing it on one specific Vista computer.

To use PC Inspector:

Step 1: Download PC Inspector Smart Recovery 4.5. In Windows XP, double-click on the downloaded file to install the program. In Vista, right-click the file and choose Run as Administrator. The installer takes a while, so be patient.

Step 2: If you have a card reader attached to your PC, take the affected memory card out of your camera, flip the write-protect "lock" tab so nothing can be written to the card, and put it in the card reader. If you don't have a card reader, attach the camera to your PC with the appropriate cable. In either case, if Windows pops up and offers to do something for you (such as copying the files into your PC), click the X button to close the AutoPlay dialog box.

Step 3: Click Start, Programs (in Vista, it's All Programs), PC Inspector Smart Recovery. You get the PC Inspector Smart Recovery main dialog box.

Step 4: In the left pane, choose the drive that contains your camera's memory card, or choose the camera itself. This can be a bit, uh, challenging because PC Inspector doesn't give you many details about the drives. But you can use Windows Explorer to find the correct drive letter.

Step 5: In the middle pane, choose the type of file you want to recover. Chances are good it's .jpg.

Step 6: In the right pane, navigate to a place where you would like to store the reconstituted files.

Step 7: Click Start. This will take a while, but you can watch the program's progress by looking at the folder that's being filled with recovered photos.

Step 8: When it's done, click the X button to get out of the program, flip the "lock" write protection tab back to its normal position, and put the card back in your camera. You're ready to snap away.

Sometimes PC Inspector refuses to install correctly (check the FAQ on the Convar site for possible solutions). Sometimes it doesn't recognize all of the files on your camera's memory card. In those cases, it's time to haul out the big guns — and shell out a few kroners.

Get SanDisk Rescue Pro if freebies don't help

If PC Inspector doesn't ring your chimes, the current reigning champion of camera-file recovery comes from SanDisk — the company that makes many of the memory cards used in cameras. You ordinarily have to pay for SanDisk Rescue Pro, but if you know the secret, you needn't spend anything extra at all.

You could head over to the RescuePro site and shell out $40 for a copy of the program. But the trick is that SanDisk gives away the software, free, on a CD, when you buy certain products. Although the list of products will, no doubt, change over time, at this moment you can buy for $35 a SanDisk Extreme III 1 GB flash memory card that includes RescuePro on a CD, or for $45 a 2GB SD card with RescuePro. Kinda makes it silly to pay full price for the software alone, doesn't it?

Using RescuePro is as simple as popping the CD into a handy drive, sticking in your memory card — and away you go. Yes, the SanDisk software works on non-SanDisk products. And you only need to buy it once: unlike some operating systems I could mention, there's nothing to stop you from using one copy of the program on all of your hardware.