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The only fully-functional, free digital image recovery sofware, and it works!

Imagine this scenario: you and your family just finished opening gifts on christmas morning. You got great shots of the excited looks on the faces of your kids as they opened their gifts. When you turn your camera to play mode to see how the pictures turned out, your camera gives you the message, "Memory card error". Frantically, you run to the computer, put the memory card in the card reader, and try to access the card through Windows. Still no luck. Not only have you lost the pictures of your kids opening gifts, you also had pictures of Christmas Eve with your inlaws and your office Christmas party on that card. Now, while you probably wish you could forget the memories of Christmas Eve with the inlaws and you probably shouldn't have been taking pictures of your boss drunk at the party, priceless memories of your kids have been lost that you can never get back.

Luckily for you, there is software out there that specializes in recovering digital images from corrupted memory cards. I tried out a bunch of these programs when the memory card that the Geeky Jockette used during her trip to Las Vegas with her family got corrupted. There are a lot of reasons memory cards get corrupted - defective cards, turning the camera off before it's done writing to the card, dropping you camera in water, etc. The problem with these image recovery programs, for me at least, is that they claim they have a free trial. What this means is that the program will scan the card and show you which images it can recover, but it won't let you save the recovered images to your computer until you upgrade to the paid version. Most cost around $30. For us, it wasn't worth paying $30 to recover some pictures of Las Vegas hotels. So we wrote the pictures off as lost.

Then, I came across Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery. It has a free version that actually recovers your images and lets you save them to your computer. To test it, I deleted all the images on my camera's compact flash card, ran the Zero Assumption Image Recovery software, and not only did it recover all the images I deleted, it also recovered pictures taken a long time ago including the Geeky Jockette's Las Vegas pictures! Flash cards are similar to the hard drive in your computer in that when you delete a file, it's not actually deleted, just the reference to that file is deleted. It actually isn't gone until it is written over by another file.

The Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery software is very easy to use. Start off by inserting your memory card into your card reader. You may be able to connect your camera to your computer, but their web site says that it may only work with certain cameras (especially those that show up as a drive on your computer). You are almost guaranteed to get it to work if you use a card reader, so buy one (~$10) or borrow one from a friend. The free version of Zero Assumption Image Recovery has a very simple interface, but it works. Simply choose which drive you want it to search (analyze), and then tell it where you would like it to save the images it recovers. The screenshot to the right shows what the software looks like on my computer. Devices 1 and 2 are the hard drives on my computer (by the way, it can also recover accidentally deleted files on your hard drive). Device 3 is my 256MB (only 243MB when formatted) compact flash card. You'll be able to tell which one is your flash card because it will be the smallest drive listed. If you don't think your flash card is listed, then click the Refresh button. Then click the button with three dots to choose the folder you would like to save the recovered files to. Click the Proceed button and let the software do its thing. It took a good 15 minutes to recover all the files from my 256MB card.

Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery is the only image recovery program that I have come across that is fully functional and fully free of charge. It's simple, it works, and it's free (did I mention that already?) And, it will probably bring you a huge sigh of relief some day. That's why it has been officially certified by GeekyJock.com. Download it today.

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