[Note: Because I am horribly long-winded, this WFMW post is ridiculously long. If you want the short version, here it is: You can recover deleted photos from your camera card with programs like this one. If you want the long version, read on.]

It was a quiet Tuesday evening. My husband was out of town and the boys were in bed. My plan was to check my email one last time and then head upstairs to read and fall asleep early. In my Inbox was a coupon from Snapfish for one of their photo collages. Oh, that looks like a neat idea, I thought. Maybe I should make a Christmas collage of the boys.

I clicked open my Pictures folder to see which photos I’d want to use. And then, my stomach dropped.

I had pictures up through December 15th, 2007. And then I had pictures starting January 19th, 2008. Nothing in between.

Nothing.

I was sick. How could I lose an entire month of pictures? And why, oh why, did it have to be Christmas pictures? I was a horrible mother — how could I do this? The pictures of L. eagerly tearing the paper off gifts: gone. The pictures of C. playing the piano for family: gone. The pictures from Christmas Eve at my in-laws and Christmas Day with my family: gone, gone, gone.

It took about 2.3 seconds to figure out what had happened. My laptop had died right before Christmas, and I got my Mac in mid-January. Naturally, I had continued taking pictures during that time period, and downloaded them to our desktop. But here’s the thing: I had created a new “Katrina profile” on the desktop and loaded them on there. When I got my new Mac, I deleted that profile. I thought I’d transferred everything I needed to the new laptop, but clearly I hadn’t. I hadn’t transferred a single picture from between December 15th and January 19th.

I hopped on the Internet, searching desperately for software that could help me recover something — anything! And I stumbled on Recover My Photos. It looked like a risk-free option: You download a trial version and have it search your memory card/device. If it finds photos to recover, only then do you pay for a license to enable the software to restore those pictures.

I downloaded it. I put my camera’s memory card into a slot on our printer, and I set the program to run a “deep scan.” To be honest, I had very little hope. It had been almost 2 months since Christmas and I’d taken well over 200 photos in that time.

The way these types of programs work is: When you delete photos from your digital camera’s memory card, it doesn’t actually delete the photos themselves, just any references to them. In other words, the data is still there, but your camera or other device doesn’t “see” it. The data is only permanently gone when the camera writes over that same area with new photos. I had taken so many pictures that I was sure the Christmas pictures were gone for good.

The scan took a long time… over an hour (it’s a fairly large memory card). While it scanned, I played around on the computer.

And then — lo and behold — I found the pictures on the desktop. They were buried about five levels down in an obscure folder labeled “Other pics.” Apparently, at some point I had backed up the pictures from my “Katrina profile” into the other, permanent profile on the computer. I have no memory of doing so, but in a fit of responsibility, I must have.

There they were — Christmas memories recorded, smiles, gifts, decorations, family. Ahhh… I could breathe again.

Then I saw that the program’s scan was done. Recover My Photos had found 286 recoverable pictures on my camera card — including a bunch of Christmas pictures. I couldn’t believe it! Thankfully, I didn’t need it now, but I was very happy to see that it was possible to find photos believed to be long gone.

I hope you never need to use Recover My Photos or similar software, but if you ever do anything silly like I thought I had done, it’s nice to know these kinds of programs exist and that they really work.

Don’t forget to visit Shannon for more WFMW tips.

Oh, wait — what’s that, Mom? You want to see one of the pictures? Okay, here you go.