Subject
Wedding flower arrangements. Arrangements made on Friday, photographed Friday evening in studio, delivered to wedding Saturday morning. No chance to repeat shoot. Client attended shoot.
Set-up
White backdrop, lit by 2x500w cool lamps. Strobe and reflector on subject.
Canon camera, tethered to laptop (old, XP) running Canon Remote software. Laptop networked to desktop (XP) in next room. Desktop running Microsoft Folder Sync (Powertoy) to sync the laptop and desktop folders (only downloading new/changed files.) Lightroom to import new files and review.
Workflow
Take several pictures of an arrangement using remote control from laptop. The images are not saved on camera card but in laptop. Use laptop for basic control and focus checking.
Move to desktop. Sync folders. Import into Lightroom. Review batch in LR. If OK move onto next arrangement and start process again.
Feel safe, two copies of each image; one on laptop and one on desktop.
Hiccup
Half way through shoot the laptop switched itself off, then back on and rebooted itself (has not done that before, no reason could be seen.) Everything seemed to be OK, continue session.
Shoot complete
Everyone happy, client takes flowers away to deliver to wedding client. I leave the post processing for Saturday morning.
Post Processing and Disaster
Open LR and review all shots. DISASTER! half the images are missing. It transpires all of the images taken before the laptop re-booted are missing from the Desktop. How can that be? They were there last night. Look on laptop, same problem. The missing images are not to be found on either computer.
Consider what has happened. On each import into LR we only check the most recent batch - LR defaults to this by showing just the Previous Import. I had assumed that the previous batches would still be in the main folder as usual, I never actually checked this.
But why did it not work?
Remote shooting numbers the images, starting from one, as they are taken and saved. It does not use the camera numbering. I believe the laptop reboot caused the Canon Remote software to reset the image number back to one. From that moment each picture would have had the same filename/number as an earlier shot. The software simply overwrote the earlier shot without warning.
When I synched the laptop and desktop folders the same thing happened, the file had changed so it overwrote the earlier image with that file name. LR only uses the files it finds in the folder so effectively it also did the same thing.
Lucky Recovery
I tried the Recycle bin and other obvious checks but was unable to locate the missing files.
Finally the situation was saved and the images recovered. In fact I found I could recover the lost images in either of two ways. One way was down to luck and the other I learned by trying something unexpected.
1. Before I discovered item (2) below I had checked the memory card in the camera. It had been re-formatted before I started the session and, as expected, was almost empty, it had just one or two shots that I had taken untethered. The camera does not save images to the card when in tethered mode; or so the manual says.
In desperation I ran the San-Disk image recovery software against the card and it found all of the images from the whole evening. It would seem the camera does save the image on the card then it must delete it after it has been uploaded to the laptop. However the deleted file is not overwritten by the next image; instead, I guess, it continues to create then delete files using the "empty" data sectors on the card. Although I assume that if the card became full it would start re-using the old data sectors this was not the case here. The card was large enough to hold all of the images from the session.
2. Also by luck earlier in the day I had experimented with LR auto-import. This did not seem that useful to me in this situation so I decided to manually import the images instead. By accident I had left auto-import switched on and it had quietly imported each new image from the synched folder into my earlier test folder on the desktop. This LR auto-import had the good sense not to overwrite a file when the content changed but the file name was the same. Instead it created a new file with a new name (adding "-2" to the filename.)
Thus I was able to recover the missing files from the card and, as it happens, also from the auto-import folder.
Lessons Learned
1. Beware Canon Remote software, it can happen that files get overwritten
2. Beware Folder Synch utilities, they can overwrite your files
3. The Canon DSLR does write images to the card, albeit they are deleted again
4. These non-existent (deleted) images can be recovered
5. Regularly check LR folders to ensure the old images still exist.
