Jumat, 28 September 2012

How To Securely Delete Your Digital Photos

Back when cameras used film it was quite easy to delete photos: you would literally burn the handful of prints you'd made along with the negatives. But with the advent of digital photographs it's a lot more difficult. But there are still times when you want to ensure that no-one else gets a look at the photos you've taken.

One of the most common times that you might want to make sure your photos are well and truly deleted is when you either sell your camera or loan your digital card to someone.

If there are photos of your family, you may well want to ensure that your children's faces don't end up on the wrong kind of site. Not that your friends would do that to you, but you never know where else the photos could get to.

So what can you do to securely erase the photographic evidence?

If the option is available, you can format the camera's memory card. Sometimes this is a menu option but you may need to refer back to the manual to find out how to do it as formatting any form of electronic storage isn't the kind of thing you want to do by accident.

Formatting will stop the casual user from retrieving the deleted photos from your memory card. But if you've ever watched programs like CSI or NCIS you'll know that their techies can press a few buttons from discs that have been subjected to much worse punishment than a simple format command and get back most if not all the data.

For once, the reality is there with the fiction. There have been programs out there for years which will do precisely that and after some time processing all your carefully deleted photos are back for the whole world to see.

There are a few ways to wipe out all the data from a camera memory card.

The most efficient is to physically destroy it. Smashing it into a myriad of tiny pieces (after having formatted it of course) works a treat. Except that if you're selling your camera, the person buying it off you on eBay will expect a memory card to be included and even nowadays a decent size card isn't overly cheap.

The next way is to repeatedly overwrite all the files on the card.

You could possibly do this by hand if you're super patient - you'd need to fill the card with random data, then delete them, maybe format the card again and repeat the process a few more times until the very last hint of the photos was removed.

But that's a pain in the neck to do by hand so it's better to use a software program to do the deed for you.

Software is cheap and, being a computer program, efficient as well. It will take all the necessary steps to ensure that even the NSA or the British equivalent, GCHQ, couldn't get your photos back.

It's a small price to pay for the peace of mind that your old photos will be misused and will never see the light of day again.

Take a look at this secure digital photo deletion software and find out how you can permanently delete digital photos.

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