Totally free photo recovery software?

[oblio]

I need to recover 2.7gig of photos from an SDHC card from my camera that I accidentally deleted. I have a reader and have checked and the photos are still there. I am after some software that is free to enable me to do this. Most of the 'free' ones have a limit on how much they will allow to recover for free.

Does anyone know of any software that I can use to do this job for free or am I going to need to part with some readies?

Thanks

[TonyRPH]

Recuva from Piriform totally free and will do exactly what you want.

A word of advice - recover the pics to an alternate drive.

[oblio]

Great - thanks Tony

[oblio]

I used Recuva and it has recovered what looks like all the photos. I have them saved on a USB stick however it's now saying that

"It appears that we don't support this file format2

when I try to open it in Windows Photo. Its file type is a JPG.

Can anyone advise please?

Thanks

[dundarach]

Are you double clicking the files?

Can you drag and drop them into a viewer?

Can you use something like irfanview as it opens most things.

Can you rename one to check e.g test.jpg

I would start with irfanview, install it, open it and see if you can drag and drop the files into there.

https://www.irfanview.com/ it's free.

[oblio]

Thanks

I downloaded irfanview off your link but now it says...

_Mg_2362.JPG Cant read file header
Unknown file format,empty/damaged file or file not found

Any suggestions?

I have moved an example to another file and tried changing its format from JPG to bmp and pmg to no avail.

Could it be the size? They are all over 5Meg

[Register1]

Thats a neat piece of software

[oblio]

Update

I managed to open them in thumbnails...which appeared on my desktop so must have downloaded with the main irfan viewer.

It shows the images which I have copied across to a folder in my laptop which I am now going to copy across onto a USB drive. Hopefully I can then access them on there to print them.

[indigochim]

Recovery programs can recover files that aren't complete maybe some of them are corrupt as they've already been overwritten on the sdcard thumbnails are embedder in the jpg files so it's sometimes possible to view those without the full image being intact.

[oblio]

I had over 500 photos and managed to recover 324 or so. I took the SD card into a phot developing place yesterday and all seemed fine with the ones I'd managed to save. The proof will be when I pick them up at the weekend.

I had to delete the 200 or so as they were corrupted in some way. The images were partial; or had images over laid; or were just blank.