Specialist work · picture files
The pictures are usually still there. A delete removes only the index entry, a format in the body lays a fresh one on top, and a card the camera refuses is often perfectly readable on a bench — and the frames stay put until something new lands over them. Here is the plain version: what a free tool really finishes, why a 50MB RAW comes home at 5MB, and how whole frames get rebuilt. Cards, drives and computers from across Birmingham and the West Midlands. Not phones.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| You deleted the wrong folder | Only the catalogue entry goes. The photograph is untouched and stays readable until fresh data covers it | Put the card away now |
| Formatted by the camera itself | The camera builds an empty index over the top. In most cases every frame beneath it survives | Good odds, provided you took no more frames |
| ‘Memory card error’, or a prompt to format it | The index has been corrupted. What sits under it is normally in one piece | Say no to the format, however many times it asks |
| Files came back but nothing opens them | What you have is the preview JPEG, or the first slice of the file | The full-size frames are probably still on the card |
| Bands of colour on a RAW, or grey halfway down | The file was stored in pieces, or something wrote over part of it | Rebuilt against the format spec |
| Video files that refuse to play | 4K footage scatters further than anything else | Reassembled with frame boundaries known |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
Before anything else, every sector of the card is copied to a working image. All of the work happens on that copy. What you posted is read once and never altered.
If the table can be repaired, everything comes back in the order you filed it: original names, the same folders, the right dates. If it cannot, we carve — reading each format by its own specification and building complete RAW frames out of scattered pieces, rather than handing you previews and calling it done.
Nothing is sent back until every recovered frame has been put up on a screen at 100% and examined. A file count proves nothing on its own. The proof is the picture itself, open on a monitor.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
Almost every photo job turns on a single question: what got asked of the card afterwards. Drop it in a drawer straight away and most of it comes home. Carry on shooting and every new exposure needs space on that card — often the space your missing frames are occupying. It costs nothing to stop, and everything to carry on.
What the free tool handed back were thumbnails: six hundred of them, and not one big enough to print. The card had gone untouched since, which is why it copied without complaint, and each CR3 original was reassembled out of its fragments. Six hundred and forty frames went home at full resolution.
On a small JPEG from a card nobody kept using, yes, it often does. The wheels come off with RAW and with video. Split files and the little preview tucked inside each frame both get logged as successes, so the count looks healthy while what you hold is thumbnails and half-frames. If the shoot matters, copy the card sector by sector before you run anything, and decide in advance what a real result would weigh.
Two things usually explain it. The software pulled out the little JPEG that sits inside every RAW and stopped there, or it grabbed the opening piece of a frame the card had written in several places. Either way the sensor data itself has often gone nowhere, and a rebuild that follows the maker’s own file structure will lift it out — provided nothing new has landed on top.
Usually not. The camera writes a clean file system over the top and leaves the pictures lying where they always were. Put the body down now and your position is strong. Every frame shot after this point eats into it.
No. Phones and tablets sit outside what we take in, with no exceptions. If the pictures have already been copied onto a memory card, a spare drive or a PC, send that in and we will work on it. The handset stays with you. Better you hear it now than after posting it.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.