Ubuntu Linux: Recover images from your digital camera flash card

I mentioned earlier that after my last trip to Hong Kong and the aviary in HK Park, a silly manipulation mistake caused me to lose my most prized pictures, close up shots of exotic birds.

What happened is that I had already taken 9,999 pictures with my Nikon D70 camera and that the camera rolled over to 1, placing the newest pictures in a different folder in the flash card. When I downloaded the pictures from the camera to the computer, instead as usual of using DigiKam which I am sure would have handled this properly, I copied the images manually using the command line. I had failed to notice the new directory and only downloaded the pictures from the original directory. After that, I used the camera menu to format the flash card. Thus, all my favorite pictures from this trip, which were among the latter pictures, were lost. Or so I thought at the time.

I kept in mind that there may still be a small possibility to recover the missing pictures using some disk recovery tool. Fortunately, I had noticed my mistake very quickly and had the presence of mind of not using that same flash card to take pictures until I had at least tried to recover the pictures.

As it turns out, recovering the pictures was very easy. It was simply a matter following the existing Ubuntu data recovery documentation.

What I did is precisely this:

1. Install gddrescue and foremost.
2. Put the flash card into my camera and connect the camera to the computer, without actually mounting the camera's flash card.
3. Create a target directory: mkdir nikon_recovery
4. Having identified /dev/sdc1 as the camera device, create as root an image of the camera card: ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sdc1 nikon_recovery/image nikon_recovery/logfile
5. Get the pictures from the image file: foremost -i nikon_recovery/image -o nikon_recovery/
6. Change the file ownership from root to the regular user.
7. Browse the nikon_recovery/jpg/ directory with any software: all the pictures were there with EXIF data!

I was surprised by two things:

1. Recovering pictures from a flash card I thought I had formated with the camera's build-in tools was much, much easier than I had anticipated.
2. I actually "recovered" more photographs than I bargained for. Not only I had my HK pictures, but I also had a copy of very old pictures I thought had been formatted and written over many times since I actually took them! So, beware of privacy issues.

Now, back to my HK birdie pictures: my status as a bad photographer is confirmed, but the conditions in the aviary are so good to take close-up shots of rain forest birds that even me managed to take a handful of, not exceptional, but at least publishable pictures. I'll crop some of them and create a small gallery here, hopefully soon.