Bench work · camera cards and photo drives
Delete a folder and the index entry is all that goes. Format in the camera and a fresh, empty index is laid across the old one. A card your body refuses to read is very often perfectly sound on a bench. In every one of those cases the frames stay where they are until new data is written across them. What follows is what a free download really completes, why a 50MB RAW comes back weighing a tenth of that, and how a frame is put together whole again. Cards, external drives and computers, from Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall. Phones, no.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
| What shows up | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The wrong folder got deleted | Only the index entry goes. The picture stays put, and stays readable, until something new is written over it | Eject it and put it away |
| Formatted by the camera itself | A blank index goes over the top of the old one. What lies beneath is usually still whole | Good odds, so long as you stopped shooting |
| ‘Memory card error’, and an offer to format | A corrupt index. What sits under it is generally unharmed | Decline the offer, every single time it comes up |
| Files came back and not one opens | Those are screen previews, or the opening fragment of each frame | The full frames are almost certainly still on the card |
| Colour banding across a RAW, or grey at the foot | The frame was written in separate runs, or part of it is overwritten | Put back to the maker’s own layout |
| Video that will not play | A 4K clip fragments far more than a still does | Rejoined on the correct frame boundaries |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
The card is imaged sector by sector before anything else, and all the work that follows runs against the copy. The original goes back the way it arrived.
Where the table can be mended, everything comes back as you had it — file names, folder structure, the dates the camera stamped. Where it cannot, we carve. Every format is read against the specification its maker published, and a complete RAW frame is assembled from the runs it had been scattered across. A preview is not a result.
Nothing goes back until each recovered frame has been put on a monitor at 100% and looked at. A count in a report proves nothing at all. Seeing it full size does.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
What usually decides a photo job: what the card did next. Shelve it the moment you notice and the odds are with you. Carry on shooting and every fresh exposure must be written down somewhere — very often across the very frames you are hoping to recover. Stopping is free.
The free tool had only produced thumbnails — six hundred of them, none large enough to print. Nothing further had been recorded onto the card after the wedding, so imaging it was uneventful. Rebuilding each CR3 from its scattered pieces put all 640 back at full size.
Sometimes. A small JPEG off a card that was shelved at once is well within reach of the free tools. RAW and video are not. Those programs total up everything they come across, and a preview embedded in a frame counts as a find, so the tally looks healthy while the folder fills with offcuts. Image the card first. Decide what a genuine file ought to weigh, and read the numbers afterwards.
Two explanations cover nearly every case. Either the program lifted out the little preview that lives inside the RAW and abandoned the rest, or it grabbed no more than the opening portion of a frame laid down in several places at once. Either way the sensor data has generally stayed put. Read the file the way its maker documented it and the frame reassembles — provided nothing has since been written across the ground it occupied.
Usually not. Formatting puts down a blank directory over the top and goes no further; the pictures beneath it are exactly where they always were. Shelve the card now and your chances are good. Every frame you take from this point eats into them.
No. Phones and tablets sit outside what this lab does, and there are no exceptions to it. Where the pictures were backed up at some point — to a memory card, to an external drive, to a computer — post that instead and we can begin. Keep the handset. Better you know now than once the parcel has gone.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.