Specialist work · cameras and cards
Deleting a folder clears the index entry and nothing else. Formatting in the body lays a fresh index over the old one. A card the camera now refuses is very often readable on a bench. In all three the pictures sit where they were written, and they stay there until something new lands on top. This page sets out what a free download can really finish, why the 50MB RAW you shot returns as a 5MB file, and how a whole frame is put back together. Cards, drives and computers, from Cardiff and across South Wales. Phones we cannot take.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| The wrong folder got deleted | The index entry is all that goes. The picture itself is untouched, and stays readable until something writes over it | Take the card out and shelve it |
| You formatted it in the camera | A blank index goes down over the top. Underneath, the frames themselves usually survive intact | Strong position, as long as you stopped shooting |
| ‘Memory card error’, and an offer to reformat | Corruption has hit the index. The data sitting below it is normally intact | Refuse the format, no matter how often it offers |
| Files returned, and not one of them opens | You are holding preview JPEGs, or the opening fragment of each frame | The full frames are very likely still on the card |
| Colour banding on a RAW, or grey below the middle | The frame was written in scattered runs, or part of it got overwritten | Rebuilt to the maker’s own specification |
| Clips that will not play back | 4K clips scatter further across a card than stills | Put back together at the correct frame edges |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
The first job is a sector-by-sector image of the card. Everything after that is done against the image. Your original is read through once, and never written to.
Where the table mends, the card comes back as you filed it — the names you gave the files, the folders they sat in, the dates on them. Where it does not, we carve: each format read on its own specification, complete RAW frames assembled out of runs spread across the card. A preview does not count as a result.
Nothing goes back before each recovered frame has been opened on a monitor at 100% and inspected. A number in a report tells you nothing. The photograph on screen, at full size, is what tells you.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
One thing decides most photo jobs: how much the card was used afterwards. Put it in a drawer there and then, and the odds are good. Keep shooting, and every new exposure has to go somewhere — usually straight onto the frames you want back. Stopping costs you nothing. Carrying on can cost you the lot.
The free software handed back six hundred thumbnails: previews, and not one printable. No one had written to it since the shoot, so the imaging pass ran clean, and each CR3 was pieced back together from its scattered fragments. Six hundred and forty frames went back at full size.
For a modest JPEG on a card that was set aside straight away, quite often it is. RAW and video are where it falls apart. A fragment counts as a file, and so does the preview buried inside each frame, so the totals look healthy while the folder holds thumbnails and offcuts. If the shoot matters, take a sector-level copy before you run anything, and settle beforehand on what a genuine result should weigh.
Normally one of two reasons. Either the tool extracted the small JPEG that lives inside every RAW and went no further, or it took the first run of a frame the card had spread over several places. In both cases the sensor data is often still sitting there, and a rebuild that follows the manufacturer’s own structure will bring it out — so long as the space has not been reused since.
Usually not. All the camera does is lay an empty file system on top; the pictures stay exactly where they were. Stop using the body now and you are in good shape. Each frame taken from here on chips away at that.
No — phones and tablets are outside what the lab handles, and there is no exception to that. Where the pictures were already copied across to another card, an external disk or a computer, send that instead and we will get to work. Keep the handset. Far better to know now than once it is in the post.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.