Prosoft Picture Rescue Version 1.1.0
8/29/04

About Picture Rescue

Digital Photography is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for both professional level studios as well as the traveling tourist. As digital cameras become more powerful and smaller in size, the most important piece to the camera is still the pictures that it takes (and has taken). Unfortunately, these digital pictures are as easy to lose as they are to take. Deleted pictures, reformatted media cards and corrupt media cards are all threats to today's digital photographer.  In our continuing pursuit of protecting against data loss of any kind, Prosoft Engineering is proud to announce Picture Rescue...

Picture Rescue can:

1) Recover Deleted pictures from your digital camera media (single delete or delete all functions)

2) Recover pictures from a reformatted digital media card (except XD cards found in Olympus and Fuji cameras)

3) Recover pictures from a corrupt digital media card (one that is no longer mounting or showing up when plugged in to the camera or media reader)

This Picture Rescue disk image contains the Picture Rescue program, and the Users Guide for version 1.1.0.

This document contains:
What's New
Hardware and Software Requirements
Installing Picture Rescue
Supported Types
Version History
Known Issues

What's New:
Version 1.1.0
New Features
Drag & Drop Recovery.  Pictures selected in the Image Recovery Window may now be recovered by dragging directly to a destination folder.  This makes it easier than ever to put your recovered images exactly where you want them.

Custom Icons on recovered picture files.  Recovered picture files will now be created with custom icons which are tiny images of their contents, making it easier for you to find the image you want in Finder.  This feature is enabled by default, but may be disabled in Preferences if no custom icons are desired, such as recovering to a non-Macintosh file system.

Secure Card Erase.  You can now erase all contents of your camera media card.  Three levels of erase security (set in the Preferences menu) allow you to choose the best tradeoff between erase speed and security level.

Other Changes
Recovery of certain TIFF format-based image formats has been improved.

A problem causing Picture Rescue to hang during processing of certain FAT filesystem data structures has been fixed.

A problem in which Picture Rescue would sometimes give duplicate names to recovered files, preventing the recovery of one of them has been fixed.

A problem which caused Picture Rescue to not see certain CF card reader adapters has been fixed.

Hardware and Software Requirements
Picture Rescue requires Mac OS X Version 10.2.3 or later, and a G3 processor or later.  At least 128MB of memory is recommended.  In order to access your camera media, you must have some sort of reader device attached, such as a USB or Firewire or PCMCIA adapter that is compatible with your media card, or a camera which presents a disk type interface to the system (appears as a disk device when the camera is attached).

Installing Picture Rescue
Installation is easy.  Simply drag the Picture Rescue icon from the distribution disk to your Applications folder.  If there is already an older version of Picture Rescue in your Applications folder which you wish to save, you can rename it or move it elsewhere to save it; otherwise, simply drag it to the Trash, or let the new version replace the old one.

Supported Types
Picture Rescue can recover many of the types of images and movie clips that are produced by modern digital cameras.  There are two levels of support, basic and enhanced.  The difference is that enhanced support can find and recover files in some situations in which basic support can't.  Picture Rescue currently offers enhanced support for the following types:

	JPEG		(This is by far the most common format used for photos)
	TIFF
	GIF
	PNG
	Quicktime movie clips
	MPEG-1 movie clips

Basic support is currently available for the following types:

	AVI movie clips
	CRW Canon raw images
	NEF Nikon raw images
	ORF Olympus raw images
	PEF Pentax raw images
	DCR Kodak raw images
	MRW Minolta raw images
	RAF Fuji raw images
	X3F Foveon/Sigma raw images
	BAY Casio raw images
	SRF Sony raw images

Version History
Version 1.0.3
Picture Rescue now by default does not display question-mark icons for damaged images.  (This can be changed in the Preferences window.)

A problem which caused Picture Rescue to hang during FAT processing has been fixed.
Version 1.0
This is the initial release of Picture Rescue.

Known Issues:
1. The Camera/Card information displayed in the main window only works for media cards containing JPEG images.

2. A number of raw image types have only basic recovery support, and no thumbnail image is displayed for many of these types.

3. Printing from Picture Rescue is not supported.

4. In some cases, Picture Rescue will find corrupted, or partially overwritten pictures on your media card. It is normal for some of the images that Picture Rescue finds to be corrupt or incomplete.

5. Picture Rescue cannot recover images from cameras that use proprietary communication formats (i.e. that require custom programs to access).  However if you remove the media cards from these cameras and plug into a reader device, Picture Rescue will be able to scan and recover from the card.

6. Picture Rescue may not be able to recover anything from media cards which are physically or electrically damaged to the point that no raw data can be read from them.

7. Picture Rescue does not yet support CD format media (CDROM, CDRW, etc.)

8. When recovering files with the "Add custom icons to recovered files" preference enabled (the default), the recovered files may show generic icons in Finder rather than the custom ones initially.  This is apparently a Finder limitation.  To make Finder display these properly, you can click on each individual file icon, or relaunch Finder by via the Force Quit menu, or by logging out and back in.

Contact Information
E-mail: support@prosofteng.com
Web: http://www.prosofteng.com
Customer and Technical Support Hotline: +1 (925) 426-6306