Monday, December 6, 2004

Image recovery utility helps overcome the oops factor

No picture is worth a thousand words if it's accidentally moved to the Trash and then deleted. To prevent "once in a lifetime" moments from inadvertently becoming digital dust, use Picture Rescue. This inexpensive OS X utility does what wishful thinking can't do. It turns back the clock to a time when your priceless digital images and movies were still safely tucked away on your digital camera's removable storage medium.

Picture Rescue works with all types of memory cards. Unlike iPhoto, it's not a preview or catalog program. You can't use it to view card images. However, if you place the card in a USB- or FireWire-compatible media reader--including your digital camera--and discover there's nothing on it (even when you know there is), you can call on Picture Rescue to recover all types of images, including MPEG and MOV movies. This versatile utility also recovers images erased when you reformat a card.

The program's interface is simplicity itself. Connect a camera or media reader, launch Picture Rescue and the program displays the storage device connected to the computer's USB or FireWire bus. It also identifies the storage capacity of the removable medium.

Click Picture Rescue's Start button to scan for deleted or corrupted images. Thumbnails of all recovered files appear in the Image Recovery window. Select the ones you want to resurrect and click Recover. Picture Rescue lets you choose where to store the recovered files. When you delete pictures from a camera or memory card, the data is not actually erased until it is overwritten. So, if you had 100 pictures on a card, deleted them, and then took 20 more pictures, Picture Rescue would be able to recover the 80 old pictures that were not overwritten. If you caught the mistake immediately, the program could recover all the pictures. While not everything will be recoverable, Picture Rescue can save the day in many lost image situations.
-CAROL S. HOLZBERG, PHD

PICTURE RESCUE:
Prosoft Engineering, Inc.  |  www.prosofteng.com  |  877-477-6763  | $59
Pros: Recovers deleted movies, MPEG clips, and digital stills from a variety of digital camera media types.
Cons: There is no option to create a "New Folder" when choosing a Save location to store recovered files (even though the manual shows the existence of such an option).
Requires: OS 10.2.3 or higher, G3 or better, 128MB RAM, media card reader or Mac-compatible USB digital camera
macHOME recommends: 512MB RAM