…come home to discover they’re all corrupt and you can’t get any of them off your compact flash card. Sound like the plot to a bad tv sitcom? Actually it happened to me. I spent a glorious 5 days on Lake George during the first week of August, took tons of pictures and then got home and discovered every single one of them was corrupt. Did I give up in frustration? Smash my camera in a fit of angry geek violence? Go steal someone else’s vacation photos off of flickr and then try and pawn them off as my own? Nope, none of the above. Instead I did some research and found Smart Recovery, a free win32 utility for file recovery off of corrupted memory cards. There are plenty of commercial products designed to deal with this problem, but I’m cheap and impatient and this filled the bill nicely – in fact it also recovered photos that I had taken at Roger’s Rock earlier in the summer which had also gotten corrupted (and which should have tipped me off to something being wrong with the camera – at the time I thought it was just an aberration since it had never happened before). Anyway this should definitely be added to your toolkit if you’re on the pc.

A slightly ironic aside – a couple of days after I recovered my pictures an instructor at Skidmore called to thank me for the help I had given her with some materials she was using in a book being published this fall. She had just sent the final version off to the publisher. During the course of the conversation she told me her horror story of losing a ton of materials she had on her 1 gig thumb drive that had gotten corrupted just days before she had to send it in, and how thankfully it only cost her $90 for a technician to recover them. I told her to call me next time, I would only charge her $45. I was kidding of course, but it is worth keeping Smart Recovery around for these kinds of episodes.