Bench work · camera cards, sticks and photo drives
£250 + VAT is where cards and USB sticks start, quoted in writing after a free look, and most go back inside two to three working days. Before any of that, though, one instruction: stop using the card. Delete a folder and all that goes is an index entry. An in-camera format writes a fresh empty index over the old one. A card your camera claims it cannot open is very often in perfect health on a bench. All three leave your frames sitting exactly where they were written until something new lands on top of them. Below: what a free download actually gets you, why a 50MB RAW arrives home at a tenth of that size, and how a frame is reassembled whole. Cards, sticks, external drives and computers, for Reading, Caversham, Earley and Tilehurst. No phones.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| You erased the wrong folder | The index entry goes and the picture does not. It stays where it is, and stays readable, until something else is written over it | Eject the card and set it aside |
| The camera formatted it for you | An empty index is laid on top of the old one, and what sits underneath it is usually whole | Good odds, so long as you stopped taking pictures |
| 'Memory card error', and an offer to format | A corrupted index. The pictures beneath it are generally unharmed | Refuse the offer, every time it appears |
| Files came back, and none of them opens | What you have are screen previews, or the first fragment of each frame | The full frames are very likely still there |
| Bands of colour through a RAW, or grey along the bottom | The frame was laid down in separate runs, or part of it has been overwritten | Rebuilt to the maker's own layout |
| A clip that will not play | 4K video fragments across a card far more than a still ever does | Rejoined on the right frame boundaries |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
Your card is cloned sector by sector before anything else happens, and every step that follows runs against the clone. The original goes home exactly as it arrived.
Where the table can be repaired, everything comes back as it was: names, folder tree, and the dates the camera stamped on each frame. Where it cannot, we carve instead. Every format is read against its maker's published specification, and a full RAW frame is rebuilt from the runs it had been scattered over. A preview is not a result.
Before a job leaves, each frame that came back gets opened at 100% on a monitor and looked over. Nobody should take a count in a report as evidence. The full-size picture is the evidence.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
A photo job is decided by what happened to the card afterwards: shelve it as soon as you notice and the odds sit with you. Keep taking pictures and every new exposure has to be written down somewhere, very often straight across the frames you wanted back. Stopping costs nothing, the look costs nothing, and on most jobs there is no fee unless the pictures come back.
Six hundred thumbnails was all the free utility had managed, and not one of them would print. No new frames had landed on the card after the wedding, so the copy came off cleanly. Each CR3 was then reassembled from its scattered fragments, and all 640 came back at full size.
On a small JPEG from a card that was shelved at once, often yes. On RAW and on video, no. Such a program adds up everything it comes across, and the preview sitting inside a frame registers as a hit, so the tally looks healthy while your folder quietly fills with offcuts. Clone the card first. Decide what a real file should weigh, then look at the numbers again.
Two explanations cover nearly all of it. Either the program pulled the small preview out of the RAW and left the frame behind, or it took only the opening piece of a picture that had been written in several runs. In both cases the sensor data itself is generally still there. Read the frame the way its maker documented it and it goes back together, provided nothing has since been written over the space it was using.
Usually not. A format writes an empty directory across the old one and stops there; your pictures are still lying where they were laid down. Shelve the card at this point and the odds are strongly with you. Every frame taken from this point onwards eats into them.
No. Phones and tablets are outside what this lab does, and there is no exception to that. What we can work on is wherever those pictures were copied to — a memory card, an external drive, a laptop, the folder of HEIC files that lands on a computer the first time anybody runs a backup. Post that and we can start. Keep the handset, and better to know now than after the parcel has gone.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.