An iMac G3. All applications + system preferences erased.

At this point, do not do anything with the iMac. Do not use it at all. This is to avoid that files are overwritten, should you be able to make the hard disk visible.

If the photographs really are of extreme importance to you, I would recommend that you get in touch with a company specialised in data recovery. However, this can very expensive, Only you can decide how much the files are worth.

Otherwise, in order to make it easier for people here to help you:

Which system version is on the iMac's hard disk (I presume that we are talking about the normal internal hard drive)?

Have you tried starting from a system CD of some sort, or a utility disc? If so, what happened? Would it be correct to assume that the hard disk icon did not appear?

Connecting to another computer via Ethernet would not work if the iMac does not contain a functional operating system. Removing the hard drive and placing it in an external case (USB or FireWire), connected to another Mac, might work (provided that the hard drive as such is OK, and that the files on it are in order).

Jan

As earlier poster said and I'll emphasize again...
You need to decide if you want your data back or not.

The more you mess with the computer the more you reduce the changes of not being about to recover your data. Don't even think about installing more software. Where could the new software go? Writes right over you lost data.

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Here the data recovery list...

Have you tried disk first aid?
You will need to boot from you installation disk. I have not done this, but here are some hints:
see this article

Or from mrtotes article :
Boot from the OS X Install disk and from the Menu Bar choose Disk Utility. Then run "Repair Disk" and "Repair Disk Permissions" on your hard disk.

Here the apple article on booting single user mode and using fsck. See the section on Use fsck:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214


Perhaps Disk Warrior will be of some help:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."
They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...
http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm

"Data Rescue II is the best data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Data Rescue II works when other tools fail. Data Rescue II is also completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive while its scanning."
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:

* been accidentally deleted.
* become unreadable due to media faults.
* been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.

http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1


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Entering:
mac data recovery
into Google will list some firms who specialize in recovering data. Data recovery isn't cheap.

Robert