Successful photo recovery like any type of file recovery is dependent upon one important factor. You must attempt the recovery before you have overwritten to digital storage media with your files. If you delete files from your camera memory card for your cameras internal storage and then take new pictures, you reduce the chance of successful photo file recovery by 99%. As soon as you realize you have accidentally deleted wanted photos or that you have picture files which are incomplete as shown by part of the photo been grayed out, you will want to use a powerful third party file recovery program to search through both your computer hard drive and your cameras SD card. These programs will recognize both the popular file extensions used for saving digital photos as well as the general coding structure of your digital images. Once located, the original file name of the deleted images can be reinstated and the file itself can be copied to new safe storage. An important point to remember when attempting photo recovery, or for that matter when trying to recover any type of damage or deleted file is that you cannot download the file recovery program onto the drive from which you hope to recover files. This in itself will result in overwriting of the data. Once image files have been overwritten either by taking a new picture or downloading any program over that allocated space, the files can never be recovered.