Even if the guy isn't insured it's quite simple to bring a county court order against him for damages.
Most CC judges see this sort of thing on a regular basis and rightly so, the "snapper" should be ordered to pay some sort of compensation on top of a full refund.
As has been said hard drives are usually recoverable no matter what the cost but I suspect the "snapper" has cocked it up and the images don't really exist any more, or did he forget to put a card in the slot?
This scenario is happening all too often nowadays and you wouldn't believe the amount of people we get in our shop asking if there is anything we can do with their wedding photos which were taken by a so called professional.
Last week we had a girl and mother in law in with a £20 Blurb photo book that you wouldn't use to wipe your backside with and a disc containing the pics. We checked the images (shot on a Nikon D300 with 18-105 kit lens, flash was non existent in any shot including cake cutting etc., ALL shot in jpg, ALL with spot metering, ISO settings of 2500 on a sunny day outside) There were two shots at 200 ISO of the wedding car, we found out these were taken by the chauffer!
She did get a full refund after being pushed by in-laws to do so but it gets worse, she actually got the refund from Groupon as the "photographer" she bought the £600 instead of £1250 deal through contacted her three days before the wedding saying he'd had an accident and another professional will be shooting her wedding instead of him! To me it seems the original guy had too many bookings and was passing work out to any Tom, Dick and Harry, so it not only seems some are losing images there are others running business's in an underhand manner who don't give a toss about their clients.
Sorry if I hijacked the post a bit.
