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Difficulties sharing results on a field trip

© Anne Kellerman

Traditionally in the month of January, higher education academic people travel and my colleague and I are no exception. We usually try to go to California to attend conferences covering the latest in multimedia and its use in education. We also like to take our digital camera and camcorders to stores in Silicon Valley to take pictures and videos of new devices, with permission of course, that we can show our students. This January was no exception. There are a huge numbers of new products, both hardware and software. Many are extremely attractive in price and function. The difficulty of choosing has increased yet again major orders of magnitude.

My colleague and I both used our digital cameras, both Minoltas, but not the same models to take several pictures. A third colleague did the same. We decided to share. As we had many pictures between us, on the spur of the moment, we decided to load all of each other's images on one of the camera's SD cards with the promise that once we got back to our home location and had access to a CD burner, we would burn CDs for each other. We also took the SD card to a local drug store that had a promotion on digital prints, 15 cents each, and made one copy of prints that we gave to our California colleague as a thank you for being our host.

We could have at this point backed up the entire SD card onto his laptop, but we did not take the time.

Back in our home location, we proceed to upload the SD card onto a laptop using the laptop's wizard that nicely renames the images. There were several hundred pictures. At the end we allowed the wizard to delete the SD card. Unfortunately, about 40 pictures were corrupted. Now, the question is, why. Was it mixing images from different camera models on the same SD card and then using one wizard session to upload them on a laptop? Was it the fact that because we had so many images that in the middle, the screen saver came on? Or was it just bad luck?

So, what do you do? Are there utility programs to fix corrupted jpeg images? We tried a few and they worked only to a limited degree. However, this month, Business Week, of all places, had an article on restoring images from erased SD cards. There are several image restore programs on the market. http://www.flashfixers.com/press/dima_10... is a web site that describes several. We have not tried any yet, but intend to.

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