In the devastation left behind from the flood waters of New Orleans, damaged photographs can seem a relatively insignificant loss.

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But tell that to the woman who lost her wedding album. The veteran who lost the photo of his favorite ship. The widower who lost the portrait of his wife.

Two Virginia photojournalists recognized the intangible value of personal photos and decided to spend their vacation and their own money on a quiet venture to a neighborhood flooded last year by Hurricane Katrina, where they planned to help flood victims restore their pictures.

Today, that modest venture is the nonprofit Operation Photo Rescue and includes volunteers throughout the world, with hundreds of experts as far away as Pakistan and Australia meticulously piecing together digital images of water-damaged photographs.

After spending a week helping restore photos with the group in New Orleans, Oceanside resident Robert McLaughlin, 52, was scheduled to be home today.

"It's really an overwhelming sense of gratitude," McLaughlin said from New Orleans on Wednesday about the reaction he has seen from the flood victims whose photos are being restored. "Several are in tears, whether they're male or female. One lady this morning had tears rolling down her face."

The originals are not scanned electronically because they usually are so brittle that the process might damage them even more, McLaughlin said. Instead, he and other volunteers in New Orleans took digital photos of the damaged pictures, and the images then were e-mailed to any of about 470 volunteers around the world, who might work for hours restoring each photo.

Working with photo-restoration software, volunteers fill in missing pieces of the pictures, sometimes digital pixel by pixel, and restore faded or distorted colors. The enhanced images then are e-mailed back and printed on photo paper the size of the original photo, which then is mailed to the owner of the photo.

Despite the successes, McLaughlin said there is only so much they can do for badly damaged photos.

"This one, you could just barely see a line of a person's hair and a dark spot where the eye was, and that was it," he said. "The rest was just washed out. We just have to tell them there's not enough information here for us to do anything."

New Orleans resident Richard Klatt's photo of his old ship, the USS Pine Island, stood a better chance at restoration. McLaughlin said the photo obviously meant something special to the veteran.

"When I asked him about himself, he immediately started talking about that ship," McLaughlin said. Although Klatt looked like a tough guy, he was close to tears when showing some of the documents and photos he had kept in a safety deposit box that were damaged when his bank flooded.

McLaughlin, a graphic artist for the North County Times, has done photo restoration for about 16 years. He learned about Operation Photo Rescue while reading the Apple Computer Web site. He offered to help restore photos, but was told there was a greater need for people to work in New Orleans, capturing digital images of originals. His trip was financed by the North County Times.

Dave Ellis, 37, photo assignment editor for the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., founded Operation Photo rescue with Rebecca Sell, a photographer at the same newspaper.

Sell and a reporter made two trips to Katrina-damaged areas to cover the cleanup, and on her second trip she returned with a picture of a woman holding a framed water-damaged photo.

"That kind of sparked the idea in my head," Ellis said in a phone interview. "I was talking to Becky about the woman with the photo. She ended up removing the photo from the frame, and it tore. She ended up throwing it away."

Ellis said the photo probably could have been saved if somebody with restoration skills had been there to help. He and Sell made plans to use vacation time to travel to the area for a week to help restore flood victims' photos. When the paper's management learned of their plan, they were told they did not have to use their vacation time and their costs would be covered. Ellis estimates his paper since has put about $10,000 toward the project.

The two went to Pass Christian, Miss., in the first week of February.

"We didn't know what to expect," Ellis said. "We didn't know if we were too late."

The coworkers discovered there was plenty of work for them because flood victims had held onto their damaged photos. Two weeks after returning from Mississippi, they formed Operation Photo Rescue. After their story was reported on Apple.com, visits to the group's Web site jumped from 800 to 7,000.

With a network of volunteers to restore damaged photos, Ellis and Sell went to New Orleans last week, where they were joined by five other volunteers, including McLaughlin, who worked out of the Eastbank Regional Library in Jefferson Parish.

"The philosophy behind it is, you've lost your house, you've lost your car, insurance is going to cover some of those things." Ellis said. "But photos are very important, and nobody's going to cover that."

Professional photo restoration costs about $60 to $75 an hour, Ellis said. So far, Operation Photo Rescue has made between 300 and 400 prints, and Ellis said he wants to keep the project going after its work in the Katrina area is complete.

"One of the things I wanted to do with my life is something I'm proud of," Ellis said. "I'm a veteran and I went to the first Gulf War, but nothing compares to this."

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.