It’s quick and easy to erase photos from your digital camera. Maybe because your camera’s designers wanted an easy way to delete photos while they were testing the design. A couple of clicks and that unwanted photo is gone forever. The snag is, that means it’s a bit too easy to remove a photo instead of preserving it, to be later transferred to your computer or passed around the internet. Or worse still, you’ve formatted your whole memory card. Blast!

If the file was on your PC you’d just open up the recycle bin and resurrect the accidentally deleted photo.

But there’s no recycle bin on your digital camera. Does this problem mean that the photos you took so much time taking are now just digital dust?

Luckily, the answer to that question is “no”.

But you need to be cautious. Camera memories work much the same way as hard disks. The available files in the menu are ones that you haven’t deleted. But the filing system hasn’t actually scrubbed all the data that makes up the photo. What it’s actually done is marked the “deleted” photo’s space as ready to re-use..

So if you’ve accidentally erased a photo, stop doing anything with your camera before you’ve done your best to retrieve your lost work of art.

As you’ve guessed, you’re not the first person to press the wrong button. So there’s some software you can use to help.

All you need to do is connect your camera to your PC in the same way as you would to download photos from it. Then click the “next” button on the software.

The photo un-delete program works to retrieve individual photos, your whole camera memory card (in those instances where the card has been totally formatted) and has a high success rate even if your photo memory card has become damaged.

It’s as simple as that to get back all those photos that you thought had been lost forever.

You can download this easy to use photo recovery sofware here.