Background

Some time ago a friend handed a memory card to us. The card was accidentally formatted in the digital camera.

At that time, Easy Photo Recovery and JPEG Recovery were not yet implemented. We tried to restore the picture using freeware and shareware (yes, we really paid to purchase a shareware to recover deleted photos). Around 75% of the pictures in the card were properly recovered.

Questions from Friend

F - Our friend asked
R - Our reply

(F): How about those 25% 'not properly recovered' pictures?
(R): Those 25% pictures were corrupted. Some contained just the upper portion. Some mingled with other pictures or with garbage.

(F): Are these all pictures in my card? Some pictures seem to be missing.
(R): We are not sure.

(F): Some corrupted pictures are very important to me. Really impossible to recover them?
(R): May or may not. We need some time to further look into the causes.

Motives to Implement Easy Photo Recovery

We then spent days and nights to study the memory card writing behavior in digital cameras. We found that even we have formatted the card before shooting any picture, the recovery software we had still, in general, could not 100% recover all pictures. The success rate got even worse if some pictures were deleted to free up memory card space, and some new pictures were then shot. We tried some other software, and similar results were found.

After we had identified the causes of the shortcomings in the recovery software that we had/tried, we started designing Easy Photo Recovery. The design of Easy Photo Recovery focused on restoring those "important but corrupted (or missing) pictures" of our friend. Unlike most of the other recovery software, Easy Photo Recovery will scan the memory card first before displaying any images. This improves the accuracy and completeness in recovering pictures (and actually the accuracy can be further improved if one more pass is scanned, but we don't think people will have such patience).

Motives to Implement JPEG Recovery

With Easy Photo Recovery, we solved some queries of our friend. But soon we found that there were some photos recovered from the memory card were still corrupted. What could we do?

Our solution: implement a new software ("JPEG Recovery") to recover those photos.

JPEG Recovery Today

Since the launch of JPEG Recovery, we received many inquiries about recovering JPEG pictures. Many pictures were precious, meaningful, and the event won't happened again e.g. wedding, new born, graduation, farewell. We shared our thoughts about the submitted samples with the picture owners. Some were good news, but some were not.

JPEG Recovery has been evolving based on your comments, suggestions and inquiries. Comparing to the initial launch, JPEG Recovery is now able to recover more types of problems. However, there are still many cases that JPEG Recovery cannot handle.

We hope that you won't need JPEG Recovery at all. But in case you really need JPEG Recovery, we hope that JPEG Recovery could help you to bring back your precious images.

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