As we arrived back from Finland earlier this week (blog report soon to appear) I tripped up and fell flat on my face. Never mind the cuts, bruises or my face ... I dropped the camera bag! That evening we were downloading our cards and Julie's Sandisk extreme III 16Gb card showed NO photos on it. Not at all good. Two possible causes: first my having dropped it and secondly that most of the shots were taken on a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II and then the card was taken out and put into a Canon 5D. This seems to break the index and corrupt the card.
Julie tried to recover the images using Lexar's image rescue program which has serviced us well in the past. This took ages to review the card, (we're talking hours), and then told us it could recover only 135 images. This was hopeless as we knew that there were hundreds of bear and wolf shots on the card.
Quick research suggested that Sandisk's RescuePRO might do the trick. $34 later it was on our main Mac. Within an hour it had recovered 719 images from the card. That is 584 more than using Lexar's program. 
Lessons for us:
1. It was a short trip to Finland so we had opted not to back-up the photos as we went along. Never again.
2. Swapping cards between two different models of camera is not advisable.
Clearly, RescuePRO highly recommended!
Adam
Recovering pictures from corrupted flash cards - 30 August 2008
