Dont' know if this is the right topic to post on , but please help if you can. Before DD was born (about 3.5 years ago) we bought a digital video camera (the way you do) and took lots of movies of her as well as stills on its memory card. The movies we converted to VHS and (being somewhat anal) we also hung onto the original digital tapes. The stills we looked at on the PC and printed some out like regular photos, although as the quality was not brilliant we also kept taking 35mm photos. Pretty soon after though, bitten by the digital bug, we bought a Canon Ixus digital camera and the 35mm camera got left in the attic. We took loads of pictures and printed them off 20 or so to a sheet - like contact sheets really ? and stuck them in a folder like a makeshift album. Every so often we would find one we really liked and print off a large high-res copy for framing or sending to GPs. Shortly after buying the camera, I bought a CD burner to attach to our PC and started sticking all our photos onto CDs for (I thought) safer storage and burning copies to send to the GPs.
Just over 2 years down the line I got a Mac and started loading all new photos directly onto iPhoto and then decided to try to back up everything onto an archive DVD. However the majority of the CDs I had burned on the PC refused to play on the Mac. OK, I thought, let?s get them up on the PC, network the two machines and transfer the files. But the PC then died. It was provided by DP?s office, so it took a while for them to set us up with a new(er) one. When I set that up, it wouldn?t play the CDs either, saying ?disk not formatted? even though it registers the title I gave the disk, or ?disk structure corrupted, disk unreadable?. Refusing to give up, I connected the CD burner, but it too was now unable to read the disks.
Aaarrggh! We?ve lost DD?s first two years worth of photos ? apart from the thumbnails we printed out for reference. There are also priceless pictures of DD and DS with my mum who died of cancer last summer, and I really, really want those back.
There are 20 CDs (none anywhere near full, but in total there must be 800-900 photos on there) that we can?t get into. Catholic guilt makes me think that in a way I?m to blame for having too much kit ? should have stuck with the 35mm camera ? but the pictures are still very precious to us and worth trying to retrieve.
Does anyone know of any software (either PC or Mac) that can help us drill down into these disks and rescue the photos. Or is there somewhere I can take or send the disks to to do it for us (although for obvious reasons I?d prefer to do it myself ? but whatever it takes I guess).