The worst possible thing that could happen with the memory stick of your camera is for it go south and you would lose all your photographs, that includes a memory that could go corrupt in a phone. After doing a little research I found PhotoRec which is freeware photo recovery that works with all forms of media.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

I had to work on a Micro-SD card that went corrupt from a phone and a corrupt SD card from a camera. I plugged into the card reader on my PC and it couldn’t read the volume and asked me to format it but I cancelled that. I ran the program and pops up on command line window, keep mind this is a freeware program that is meant to do a job and doesn’t look pretty. You pick the lost MiniSD card that the program can see then you choose a location for it to deposit the recovered files, there are a few technical steps in between like what type of file system was used for the card, I managed to pick the right one. As things progressed it too about 10 minutes to finish all the choices and then the program starts, it said approximately 57 minutes to recover 16 GB worth of pictures. I came back an hour later it recovered everything that was on there even things that I didn’t know was on there. Overall about 70-80% of the pictures were recovered, the rest were either text files or disturbed black images. The program does what you need it to do even though its a bit on the rugged side, I think its a fantastic program.

Link: PhotoRec