Photographs are the one file type nobody can recreate. A spreadsheet can be rebuilt; the wedding, the graduation, the last holiday with someone — those exist exactly once. Photo recovery is therefore its own discipline here, spanning every device pictures live on: the card from the camera, the stick they were moved to, the laptop they were sorted on, the external drive that held “the archive”.
The card that errored mid-shoot. The delete that ran on the wrong folder. The format that was meant for the other card. The laptop that died with ten years of pictures unsorted on the desktop. The external drive that clicked once and went quiet. Different accidents, one common truth: in every case, most of the images usually still exist — as deleted entries, as intact data under a fresh format, or on platters a failed drive can no longer present.
The enemy is rarely the accident itself. It is what gets written afterwards — new shots on the card, new files on the drive, a helpful reinstall.
Recovering photos properly means working beneath the file system. The device is imaged once, gently, and the images are carved from the raw data by their signatures: JPEG and HEIC, every RAW dialect — CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG — and video alongside, MP4, MOV and fragment-prone AVCHD reassembled so footage actually plays. Where a drive has physical damage, the drive is repaired first; the carving always happens on the copy.
Fragments matter in this work. Half a JPEG is a real photograph with a grey bottom; we chase the missing half rather than shrug.
The deliverable is checked and human: images that open, videos that play, duplicates collapsed, everything organised by date and delivered on new media — with an honest note about anything that came back damaged or not at all. Before you pay, you’ll know what was recovered; on most jobs, if the photos don’t come back, no fee applies at all.
Memory cards and USB sticks are a fixed £250 + VAT; single drives of any kind are £300 + VAT. Chip-level exceptions are named and quoted before anything is attempted. Everything starts with a free diagnostic, the figure goes in writing before work begins, and on most jobs nothing is owed unless the data comes back. No hourly meter, no evaluation fee, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Very good — if the device stops being used now. Deletion removes the index entries, not the images, and they persist until new data overwrites them. Every fresh photo, download or sync is a lottery against your album, so power the device down or eject the card and get it in as-is.
Both, seamlessly — the drive comes out (or the board is worked directly on soldered machines), gets imaged, and the photo recovery runs against that image. A dead computer almost never means dead pictures; it means the pictures need a different door out.
Often, yes. Half-grey images mean the recovery grabbed truncated data — a common result of free tools reading a struggling device. Working from a proper hardware image, the complete frames are usually still recoverable, and re-carving them whole beats repairing broken exports every time. Send the original device, not the failed exports.
Everything a camera writes: all the major RAW dialects, stills and bursts, plus drone and dashcam video with its awkward fragmented containers. RAW and long video are exactly where generic tools fall down, and exactly where signature-level carving earns its keep.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from anywhere in the UK. The work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
Stop shooting, stop copying, stop “testing” — and let the free diagnostic tell you what survives. Photo recovery for Glasgow: cards, drives, sticks and dead machines, carved back frame by frame and returned as a gallery, not a gamble.