Spear-it
I’ve heard that there’s a first time for everything. Well, add another one of those items to my list, please.
Saturday, after the Peaceful Dragon Chinese New Year’s festival, I came home, removed the card from the camera (Nikon V1), started Lightroom, placed SD card into the reader, and took a quick bathroom break. When I came back, I was surprised to see that all the files had loaded. I thought: Wow! That was quick. The files must have been very small to have loaded nearly 1300 files in that short of a time. Well, I was shooting JPEG. Anyway, I proceed to work with the files, exporting some to place on my Facebook page for all to see.
After I finished selecting the images that I wanted to export, and exporting them, I decided to pull the card out, reformat it, and get ready for the evening’s activities. I have Lightroom set to auto-eject after the import, so I just pulled the card out.
I saw a message that indicated that I pulled the card without properly ejecting it. Odd. Oh well, I’ve seen that before, rarely, and no harm, no foul. So, without thinking, I put the card back into the camera, formatted it, and placed it into the bag.
A little while later, I saw another picture that I wanted to play with. So, I double clicked it and get a message from LR saying that it couldn’t find the original. Huh? As I clicked on more and more of them and get the same message, I had a sinking feeling. Crap! I should have heeded that message. I had nothing but previews. The files behind were missing and I had already formatted the card.
Fortunately, I know a thing about disks and knew that the data was still there, only the directory was ‘reset’, all that I would need is a program to recover the images. I took the card out of the camera and set it to the side. I went to Google and did a search for SD card file recovery and found a program, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery, read some reviews that were quite positive, ordered a copy for $39, and recovered every one of my files.
I will admit that I was pretty tired and didn’t follow my own procedure for downloading and use of cards. I have 4 SD cards and use them in round-robin fashion. Take one out, copy the files, place it in back of all the others, take the one from the front, put it into the camera, format, and use. That way, the most recent one is always 3 behind and I’ve never lost any files nor had the need for such a program … but, as they say, you learn something new everyday and I learned to follow my process. It was a cheap lesson, but one that I probably won’t forget!
Note: This photo was a nice find. I remember Natalia coming out running and yelling with her spear, as part of the show. I wanted to get a shot of her, but didn’t want to be right in front of her. I was slightly off to the side and trying to pan. At first, I thought that I had blown this shot, but the more that I looked at it, the more that I liked it.
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Wow Paul, just had a similar thing happen to me. I got the S95 for Christmas and took a bunch of photos and soem time later went to move them from the SD card to the Mac. Well, I only found about 4 photos on the card. Thinking that one of the kids probably deleted the photos while playing around with the camera, i put the SD card back in and went about my day as though all was lost. Some time later that day I was lamenting the lost photos I remembered that a Lexar CF card I bought with my D300 came with a free copy of “Image Rescue” As you might guess, I put the SD card back in the card reader and yep, retrieved the photos.
Gotta love flash card recovery software…
Rule of thumb: if someone is running forward at a fast pace, aiming a spear, do NOT stand right in front of them.
Step to the side and live to shoot another day. .
And that’s the difference between the “Add” and “Copy” commands in the Import dialog screen in Lightroom!
I never do anything except “Copy” so that’s not an issue for me.
Good that you were able to recover the files.
Actually, Tom, I was using copy, not move. Here’s what I think happened: When I went away, all of the previews showed up. I came back, not paying attention, and started working with the previews, but I’m not entirely sure how I missed the check boxes, which would have been a sure indication of working with previews. I never clicked the Import button, and thus, they were not copied to my hard drive. When I pulled the card, all that I had was what was in memory, previews.
After rescuing my photos, I went back and tried to do a postmortem on my procedure and found out that LR does, indeed, allow you to work on the previews just like they were normal photos, which they are, except the full photo is still on the card, not on your hard drive. So, I missed one important step, pressing the import button. This is why I never got the message the card was ejected after import .. there was no import.
That’s interesting, and I guess is one of the pitfalls of the import screen looking so much like the Library screen. All I ever use it for is Importing, but I can see where that could confuse, especially if you walked away and came back.
I’ll put that down as a “lesson learned” for my next Lightroom class!
I’m glad that I could be of service, Mr. Dills! That one is on the house The next one, though ….
I never trusted the auto-import feature of any organizer, preferring to do it manually. I am surprised you were able to recover after formatting. This is very important information to know.