Yesterday I got into corruption. What I mean is digital things going wrong, and this wrongness causing new wrongness. It all started when I had the camera in hand to take out the memory card for transferring the photographs to the iMac.
I was a bit tired, and thus I wasn't sharp enough, and so instead of doing what I should have done I started up the camera, navigated the menus, and ... formatted the memory card. One second too late I realized what I was doing.
Well, what to do? I searched the net for software for rescuing photographs from memory cards, and there is a lot of that available. I tried a free one from the App Store, but that was only a demo, the full version was over 30 euro... and I'm cheap. So I bought the cheapest non-free app, costing something like 12 euro.
But even though the app installed and started up, it didn't show the memory card in the list of devices. In fact, no disks were shown. After searching for help pages (not much help), I finally found a link for downloading a different version of the same software from the web pages of the company. And finally the memory card was shown, I could do a search, and a lot of files were found, including the photographs from yesterday. And the recovery function seemed to work, fetching several hundred files.
After looking at the files I deleted some (preview images) and imported the rest into Aperture. ... But then Aperture crashed. Whn I started it up again, there was a message telling of problems with the Aperture Library, which had to be repaired. That took some time. When that was finished I (and the iMac) went to sleep (or I tried without real success).
Today I started up Aperture once again. And the Library needed repairs, again. I noticed that some of the imported photographs seemed to have corrupt data, and I deleted those. Finally everything seemed to be back to normal. I hope. I picked the best and deleted the rest, and uploaded to Flickr.
What you see here are some of the rescued photographs from yesterday, plus one taken today. I'm not sure whether the rescue operation was worth the effort, but at least I now know something of what to do if this happens again. I fact, it is surprising that the same thing hasn't happened previously.
(Posting title is from the poem The Rescue by Robert Creeley.)
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