Photo Booth is an application provided by Apple that allows Mac users to capture video clips and photo snapshots using the built-in iSight camera or a webcam. The software also allows these files to be emailed, imported into iPhoto, added as contact photos, and used as iChat icons. Its unique feature is that you can add various special effects to these photos.

With such a wide variety of functions, Photo Booth is now a widely accepted application among Mac OS X users. Pictures and videos captured by Picture Booth are worth remembering and look professional. As easily as Picture Booth captures those images, they can also be deleted in an instant, creating the potential for accidental file deletion. There have been several practical cases where the user has accidentally deleted Picture Booth files. However, you cannot restore these files unless you use a backup or run a Mac Photo Recovery utility.

To understand it better, consider using Picture Booth to capture photos and videos of a unique party. You see an image and accidentally click the little ‘x’ button that appears at the bottom of the thumbnail. Or delete some of the photos from the original location, believing that they will not be deleted from Picture Booth. Also, empty the Trash. These are typical examples of accidental deletion related to Picture Booth.

Solution

If you haven’t restarted the app or the system, you can search the following location for lost photos:

/private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/com.apple.PhotoBooth/IntermediateTrashDirectory/

This solution is applicable when you have deleted the photo using the ‘x’ button. In other cases and if the above solution fails, you need to restore the lost photos or videos from a backup. But if no backup is available, it is suggested to use a deleted photo recovery utility.

Specific Mac Photo Recovery tools are designed to run unique algorithms that can scan and then recover lost digital files from any media. Also, these apps are easy to install and safe to run. Photo recovery software can rescue deleted digital files that have not been overwritten.