I have a Sony Ericsson P1i which I also use as a digital camera (I know, I should get a proper camera, but at least at daylight its snapshots are OK). Since I lost the data cable to connect it to the PC, I use Bluetooth to transfer the photos from the phone to my computer, which runs on Win 7.
Yesterday, I wanted to do precisely that, so I turned my laptop’s Bluetooth menu to receive and the cellphone’s to send, and transferred about 50 pics. When that was done, I chose a folder where to put the received pics (or so I thought), clicked finish, and deleted them from my cellphone. After that, I noticed that the pictures were not in the destination folder, for reasons I do not know. A search for the file names in the Win 7 search function on the local drives of the computer did not unearth them.
So essentially there are two ways of recovering these pictures, which I would very much love to recover: Either from the memory of the cellphone, where I guess they still are somewhere even though they’re not listed on the file manager of the phone any more, or digging up wherever my computer put them after the Bluetooth transfer, which did not result in any error or process aborted messages.
Any thoughts on how I could get them would be most appreciated!
Lexar makes a (free) image recovery program. IIRC it was called “Image Rescue.” I would download that and get a card reader that will allow you to take the memory card from the phone and hook it right up to the computer.
You’ll find pictures you’ve completely forgotten about that you deleted years ago.
While a GUI program like that is probably easier, there’s also one called Photorec that is fairly easy to use. It’s designed to recover files of many different types, not just pictures. It also comes with TestDisk, which has an undelete built in that you may want to try first.
Also, if you have a computer cable for your cellphone, you may be able to use it as memory card reader and not have to get a separate one.
I’ve had good results from Zero Assumption Image Recovery (of which there is a free version available) - but I think any of these methods will require the storage to be mounted (so either a cable enabling the device to appear as a removable storage volume, or the memory card - if it is removable - plugged into a card reader connected or inbuilt to the PC)
Coincidentally, I downloaded that software already because the Lexar software recommended by Joey P (thanks for the tip nonetheless, it brought me on that track!) is available for free only in a trial version, and I found this ZAR thing when looking for a free alternative. I am also in the lucky situation of having found the USB cable again, so I can mount the phone directly to the PC and will give that a try.
Thanks a lot to anybody here! Very much appreciated.
The other thing that might work is to search your computer for all files with a timestamp in the last day or two (or if the photos were not taken in that timeframe, a small date range that you know at least one of them was taken in) - it could be that the files are still there somewhere on your machine, but that the transfer process renamed them to something less than obvious as an intermediate step.