How can I recover lost photo's?

Question

I got back from a 2 week holiday yesterday. Throughout the trip i was taking photos on a dslr and transferring them to my ipad 2 using apples camera connection kit. In the end there were about 2000+ photos on my ipad. I plugged in my ipad to iTunes to transfer the photos and it appears that iTunes has replaced the photos on my ipad with that in my library (no photos) i quickly unplugged my ipad, checked the photos app and there are none in there, i cant find them on my mac either. I was devastated because i thought i had lost all my holiday photos, but whenever i click on the ipad tab in iTunes it says that 9.5gb of the ipads capacity is being used by photos. So they must still be there, but how do i get them onto my computer/recover them? Please help me, i'm struggling and getting pretty upset at the moment. The applecare line has closed for the day as well.

Answer 1

Photos imported from a digital camera, captured by the iPad 2, or saved from a recieved email or from a website with the iPad are not touched during the iTunes sync process and cannot be imported from the iPad by iTunes. These photos are included with the iPad's backup which is updated by iTunes as the first step during the iTunes sync process and are stored completely separate from photos that are transferred from your computer. iTunes handles the transfer of select photos from your computer - selected under the Photos tab for your iPad sync preferences with iTunes, but iTunes does not handle the import of photos from the iPad's Camera Roll or from the All Imported for photos imported from a digital camera with the camera connection kit.
The files you found in the depths of your Mac are in your iPad's backup which is updated by iTunes as the first step during the iTunes sync process. The backup is a SQLite database. There are some 3rd party utilities that provide for extracting select data such as photos from the backup.