A friend of mine just returned from a European visit and assumes that he lost all of his digital pictures because he pushed the wrong button. He has a Vivatar 150 and protected each picture after taking them. The last time he was going to protect a picture he pushed Format mode, by mistake, which immediately produced a screen showing No files existing. It went back to...

yeah they’re all gone. format completely wipes the memory card.

For future reference when asking a question, ask a simple question in the title, then describe it in detail. For this one something like “Are my digital photos lost?” as the question, then for the details, tell the story.

i second perchik’s suggestion

Thanks for the answer and feedback. So what does – Protecting a picture – protect against? The Delete button?

Sometimes you can recover things even after a format… It’s rare, but if you don’t use the data card at all specialists can sometimes recover data (It could be worth it you really care about the pictures). See if you can find a local data-recovery expert… there’s still a chance they can help you. And be sure not to touch the card at all until then.

Oh yeah—I suspect “protected” just protects you from accidentally deleting, not formatting (Yes, pretty lame :-( ),

There is an application called Image Recall by Flash Fixers that may work.

Most drive partitioning tools can recover files from a storage device if the file table has simply been cleared.

If you are even lightly computer savy, you should look at one of the many data recovery tools for Linux. They are fairly easy to use and are freely available.