Help! My picture CD didn't burn correctly at Walmart

[rluey29]

I'm very frazzled about this!!! I had about 400 pictures of Disney as well as a lot of really precious ones of my infant son on an SD card. I went in to Walmart, popped it into the machine, and had them copied onto CD and I also got the pages of tiny thumbprints to go with them.

Well, I go to look at them a few weeks later and they're not there. I tried many times. I took it back to Walmart and they try it in all of their machines. They finally told me that they had been having problems at that time and it didn't burn the CD correctly. Now all my pictures are gone!!

All I have is the little thumbprints of the pictures. They told me they couldn't print them off of that. There HAS to be a way... I am so livid!!! Those are memories that I can't get back and I am such a picture person.

Does anyone have any ideas???

 

[tcmata]

You might want to check on the photography board to see if they have any suggestions. I wonder if there is a possibility of retrieving them from the memory card...I am really NOT sure though.

I wonder if that is why our Walmart now has a sign up to not delete your memory cards until you verify your order is right.

 

[aka-mad4themouse]

Moving this over to the photography board...

I know that there is software that can recover the images from your SD card as long as you have not written over them with new pictures. They work even if you have "erased" the picture from the card. I'm not sure of the software names but maybe someone here can help?

 

[annnewjerz]

Luckily, I've never had to do this---but there are people on this board that have experience with image recovery and they recommend ZAR. Here is the link. It is software you download---not sure exactly how it works but as long as you didn't take new pictures over the old ones, you should have a really good shot at getting them back.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm

Good luck!

 

[ukcatfan]

If they really didn't make it to the cd, then the recovery methods already mentioned are probably your only hope.

On a side note, I have taken pics off a Walmart photo cd once and the actual pics were buried deep in a sub-folder. It took me a few minutes to actually find them. Have you explored through all the sub-folders? You could also try doing a search of the cd drive using the search term *.jpg Put it in list view and if any of the files are larger than say 1MB each, then those could be your pics. The size depends on your camera model, MPs, etc. but should be at least that size if it is 3MP or more. The thumbs are probably going to be in the low hundreds of KBs and should never be as large as 1MB.

 

[ssanders79]

I've used http://www.recuva.com/ a few times to recover files from my hhd and SD card.

As long as you have not used up all of your storage space on the SD card you should still be able to get back some of the files.

Best of Luck.

I learned a similar lession when backing up to a CD. Always verify the images on your computer, CD, DVD, ect before you reformat your memory card.

 

[KAT4DISNEY]

Luckily, I've never had to do this---but there are people on this board that have experience with image recovery and they recommend ZAR. Here is the link. It is software you download---not sure exactly how it works but as long as you didn't take new pictures over the old ones, you should have a really good shot at getting them back.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm

Good luck!

I have used the ZAR software to recover photos from a disk I had reformatted. It's free to use to recover photos from a card also so that's a plus! It takes a little while to run but it worked.

 

[jann1033]

I'm very frazzled about this!!! I had about 400 pictures of Disney as well as a lot of really precious ones of my infant son on an SD card. I went in to Walmart, popped it into the machine, and had them copied onto CD and I also got the pages of tiny thumbprints to go with them.

Well, I go to look at them a few weeks later and they're not there. I tried many times. I took it back to Walmart and they try it in all of their machines. They finally told me that they had been having problems at that time and it didn't burn the CD correctly. Now all my pictures are gone!!

All I have is the little thumbprints of the pictures. They told me they couldn't print them off of that. There HAS to be a way... I am so livid!!! Those are memories that I can't get back and I am such a picture person.

Does anyone have any ideas???

have you reformatted your card or deleted the photos from the card? if not they should still be on the card ( just didn't see anyplace you mentioned you did that ) unless the machine does that automatically ( which would be something that would be kind of dumb for it to do)

 

[seashoreCM]

It may be possible to recover some of the pictures off of the original memory card even if you formatted it or started to re-use it. This is a job for a computer geek. Meanwhile it would be a good idea to stop using that memory card until you get the whole situation resolved and as many pictures recovered from both CD and card (and perhaps buy another one for your normal regular picture taking right now).

Next time do not re-use, do not erase, do not format your memory card until after you get the CD home and verify its contents by viewing most of the pictures.

I really suggest burning two CD's before re-using the memory card. Alternatively if you have a huge hard drive on your computer, one CD will suffice but copy it onto the hard drive and verify the quality/integrity of that copy too by viewing pictures

Digital camera hints: http://www.cockam.com/digicam.htm