Don’t delete…..
Boy did I learn an invaluable lesson yesterday. Fortunately for my friends, they learned from my mistake. i was having fun walking around laguna beach for some street photograpjy. i came upon a girl practicing some martial arts moves and she let me photograph her on the boardwalk. I took shots of some adorable dogs and their humans as they enjoyed the day. i would say i had around 200 - 300 shots. granted i wasn’t particularly excited about any of them, but there were a couple that i was anxious to get home and see. my friends and i tried a little icm (intentional camera movement) on some passing vehicles. i’m not great at that so when i saw what i was capturing, i knew they weren’t keepers so went about deleting individual images from my card. big mistake. next thing I knew, i had deleted everything off my card. my camera has the option to delete a single frame or all frames. i didn’t intentionally hit “all frames” but I sure must have because the next thing i know, every image i shot that morning was gone. in disbelief, i looked at both cards, i took each card out, i turned the camera on and off, even removed the battery and put it back in, hoping that somehow i was mistaken and all my images would reappear. nope! gone, poof, bye bye, see ya.
when i got home i went about finding articles and youtube videos on how to recover data. there are plenty of options out there. searched best apps for 2024 for a mac. of course they all have a free trial for a certain amount of data but with a 40mp sensor, one file far exceeded that “free trial” option. since it was just a day of fun and i didn’t really have anything noteworthy, i didn’t want to invest the $89 to buy the “upgrade” that was necessary to save my images. what I did discover is that even after formatting an SD card after a shoot, the images do stay on there for a long time. That software program showed that there were a lot of images from earlier in the year. how retrievable those are, i couldn’t tell you but they were still reading on that search.
lesson learned - don’t delete until you can upload all images and then decide. i now set my 2nd card to serve as a backup instead of sequential and i won’t delete even the worst shot until i get home.