We’ve all been in situations where we delete items and then later rethink that we could’ve used them elsewhere when it’s all too later. This is where Stellar’s suite of recovery software comes in. Today we’ll be reviewing the Mac version of Stellar Photo Recovery.
Photos tend to be the most sought file types for recovery as in the most common example of a photographers who tend to format their SD cards after finishing a job, deleting images to make room for the next gig. In a lot of cases these photographers will have to go back to recover an image or multiple ones due to negligence or some other factors. This is where Stellar Photo Recovery comes in, promising a seamless recovery experience.
Now before we continue further, it should be noted that rule one for recovery is that you should be doing it immediately after deletion without overwriting any files on it. So if you’re trying to recover images from your SD card, if you use the card after formatting it taking a few pictures, that will hinder the recovery process. Throughout the review process I was mostly recovering images from immediately formatted drives, or just files that I would delete and then recover, in the case scenario the recovery was very seamless and took just a few seconds per image.
Stellar Photo Recovery supports a wide variety of formats which include image formats like JPEG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD, Adobe EPS etc. Camera RAW Files like CR2, ERF, RAF, K25, NEF, ORF, SR2, etc. Video Files formats including MOV, MXF, AVI, ASF, WMV, MP4, 3GP, etc. The software also supports a wide variety of devices include GoPro, Cameras, Encrypted Cards, Storage Devices and many more. The compatibility options are really good and high chances are whatever device or file type you’re using will be compatible. In addition to photos, the software is also able to support Audio and Video files which is great as you can use it as an all-in-one software for all your recovery needs.
Now on to the recovery process, which is extremely simple and seamless. The first step is opening the program, followed by choosing what file type you want to search for. As mentioned earlier Stellar Photo Recovery not only supports image formats but also audio and video formats, so as seen in the screenshot above you can choose to customize your search. After choosing your search format or formats, the next step is to select the drive or device to scan, after the scan is complete you just select the files you want to recover and that’s it. The scan is fairly fast, for context my 128gb USB flash drive took around 40 minutes on 2019 MacBook Pro, while search for multiple file formats. The recovery takes even less time, around a few seconds per RAW file. It should be noted like most recovery softwares, due to how they work, they’ll be renaming the recovered files themselves since the original index file responsible for your previous naming schemes are not recoverable.
Overall Stellar Photo Recovery is an extremely powerful software and honestly at least in my experience as a Mac user, should be the only recovery software you need for multimedia files. The software is available with a free trial as well as three price tiers allowing you to get only the functionality you need, so you can basically add on features if you need them. You can download Stellar Photo Recovery from Stellar’s website.
