Question: So I just accidentally deleted all of my family’s summer vacation photos in iPhoto…?
I deleted all my vacation photos by moving them to the trash (the trash in iphoto, not in finder) and proceeded to empty the trash. the reasoning behind this was that i thought all our photos were still on the camera, but unfortunately, they had been deleted during the import to the computer. i realized this roughly a minute after i had completed the deletion. luckily, i knew a thing or to about accidental deletion, and knew the best course of action was to immidiately shut down the computer to prevent anything from being written over the data on the hard drive. i also turned off and removed the batteries from the camera and took out the memory stick, in case it would be possible to salvage some or all of the photos from there. i know there are programs (like norton utilities) that can find deleted files before they are written over. my question to you is: whats my best course of action now to try and recover my photos?
btw ,my computer/camera specs are
-roughly 1 year old iMac 27″ (the gray and black one) running OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, ( ~14 GB free space, if that helps)
-Sony Cybershot DSC-S730 digital still camera with 2GB memory stick pro DUO
family vacation photos

Best answer:

Answer by Chris C
There are a variety of drive recovery programs out there. You will need an external hard drive if you want to recover the photos from the iMac itself. The best program is Data Rescue, not cheap but it has saved me from more than a few accidental deletions. You can get it or learn more about it from http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php. It also works on memory cards. There is a demo that will show you the files it can find and the chance of recovery so give that a shot before shelling out the big bucks. Good luck!

Just a note: Recuva is a great program but it will only work on Windows and only work to recover files off of the memory card from the camera. If you can’t recover from there and you turn to recovery on your Mac Recuva won’t work.