One bedtime, one wrong button, every vacation photo gone.
A week after our family vacation, our daughter took her kids' camera to bed to look through our holiday photos one more time before falling asleep.
While flicking through the pictures, she accidentally triggered the delete-all function — it's just one button press away from the photo viewer — and confirmed the warning with the wrong key. Seconds later, every picture was gone.
She ran to her mother in tears: "There are no more pictures on the camera!"
That same night, I sat down to try to get them back. Every program I found advertised itself as "free" — but wanted an annual subscription worth several hundred euros before it would actually recover anything. After a long search, I found one that recovered a limited amount of data for free. It was just barely enough.
Ever since, I've wanted to spare other parents this: spending a small fortune on what is hopefully a one-time problem. This isn't about professional forensics — it's about getting deleted photos back from an SD card or USB stick after a small mistake.
