Stellar Photo Recovery Review: Best Photo Recovery Software?

The worst nightmare of being a photographer or someone who loves capturing things is accidental deletion of photos. I remember the day when I unintentionally deleted some of the pictures and video clips clicked during vacations with family- this incident wasted a hell lot of time and hard work, resulting in sleepless nights in anguish and panic, looking for the solution to get back those precious memories.

If you have experienced something similar, you better know that it does matter a lot in person. This is the reason why it’s always advised to keep the data backed up regularly but not many people care about doing the aforementioned and hence end up being in a troublesome situation.

However, it’s a huge relief to say that at most of the instances, it is possible to recover the deleted photos using a good photo recovery software, unless and until the storage device carrying the pictures gets damaged at the hardware level.

Now, there are tons of software available in the market for the same including paid and free options and you might already know that most of the freemium data recovery software turn out to be either a gimmick or a total waste of time. In such cases when some important loss has to be recovered, we suggest you to use a good paid recovery solution.

One such good software is the Stellar Photo Recovery software which excels in the recovery of pictures, videos, and audio files. Let us talk about it in detail.

User Interface

The Stellar Photo Recovery software comes with an easy & highly intuitive user interface and there is nothing as such fancy with it. On starting the software, you are welcomed by straightforward recovery options for video, audio and image files.

For recovering desired deleted multimedia files from Hard disk, USB drive or any other storage device, simply tap the blue button that reads out “Recover Photo, Audio, and Video”.

Now, you need to select the drive where you want the files to be recovered from. Also, make choices in the check boxes present on the right side at the bottom to choose between Photo, Audio and Video depending upon your requirement. Like if you have lost a video file due to accidental deletion, partition issues etc, you can keep your selection limited to video, thus the software will ignore all other files stored in the disk, making the overall process a bit less time consuming.

Furthermore, if you need more complex control, then you can open the advanced settings menu which further lets you choose between different formats of different media types ranging from general file formats like JPEG, BMP, AIMR, MP3, M4A, OGG, 3GEP, MPEG, MP4 to proprietary ones like Adobe EPS, Adobe in-design and RAW files from Canon, Kodak, Epsom, Nikon and Intel etc. You can also define the starting and ending sector to allocate the files. For instance, if you shoot all your images on a Canon digital camera, then you won’t require the software to search the storage device for any Sony or Nikon RAW files, just select the Canon RAW formats in addition to the CR2 and JPEG and you are good to go.

Once you start scanning, the software will thoroughly search for the desired media files which were deleted in past by you, this process may take several minutes depending upon the storage size and you will be shown a proper live preview of the pictures it has processed at that moment. After the scanning is finished, you will get a detailed list including file names and location which can be recovered using Stellar Recovery software. You can further switch between list, grid and gallery view as per your convenience.

Speed

The Stellar Photo Recovery takes a lot of time to scan for the recoverable files. It also depends upon the total capacity of the drive where the scan is being performed and the size and type of files which have to be looked for. Usually, it takes less than two hours for sorting out the lost files. In our case, it took approximately 50 minutes for the software to fetch through a 70GB drive partition.

This time will significantly reduce with SD cards and USB drives, following the same, it the scanning took just 15 minutes to complete on our 16GB Samsung MicroSD card. Moreover, a more powerful configuration will further accelerate the process. Also, you can reduce the scanning time by specifying preferred file types and drive location as discussed above.

The scanning speed is better than most of the other recovery software we tried in past. In addition to that, the software is really efficient and gets most of the deleted data to the shore.

Recovery Ability

The Stellar Photo Recovery software has the capability to recover unintentionally deleted or lost photos from most of the popular digital camera including Sony, Canon, Nikon, Panasonic etc in their native RAW file format, MicroSD cards, SD cards, USB Pendrives, external and internal hard disk drives.

In detail, you can recover deleted/lost images (i.e. JPEG, BMP, PNG), videos (i.e. AVI, 3GP, MP4, MOV, and MXF) and audio (i.e. MP3, WMA, AMR) files from the above-discussed media storages. It can support most of the major file systems including FAT32, ExFAT and NTFS File Systems and can save the scan information in the tree hierarchy for the same to resume recovery later.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to recover ever bit of lost data with these software solutions and Stellar is no different. We deleted multiple files and even formatted few partitions on our hard disk drive and MicroSD card to test out the performance and efficiency of the software. Although, on each scan, we found few of the files missing, the efficiency rate was somewhere around 90%. The files found took relatively less time to show up at the desired place after we clicked the Recover button and selected the location where we wanted the file to be.

Say, you will lose approximately 10% of the deleted images permanently, still, this is one of the best recover-ability rates that we saw so far in such software and it is obvious not to expect every penny of what has been erased. With that being said, it is a life savior in most scenarios as the files you were looking for are mostly present there.

One thing to note here is that if you formatted the SD card containing pictures using PC or the format card option within the Camera, then you might face a tough time getting back those files. The software was unable to detect files lost after a full format, however, it does work if you have deleted the files even on the camera (not formatted the storage card) making a good solution in most of the cases.

Also read: How To Test/Check Speed Of Memory Card On Android Device

The files recovered are in their original size and contain original date timestamp, camera model/name, resolution and file name which further adds to the user convenience.

Purchase

The Stellar Recovery Software allows you to scan for files in the free version and further if you are interested in recovering those files then you have to pay. This is beneficial in a case when you loose something important. You can simply install the free version and check if it detects your file and if it does so, you can pay proceed with the payment to recover the files.

Stellar Pheonix comes in three paid versions namely Standard, Professional, and Premium. The Standard version is the cheapest of all and costs approx $35 while the professional version costs approx $50 and the premium version is most expensive of all at approx $75. All the three versions come with lifetime license validity, unlimited data recovery and will be instantly delivered to mail.

Coming to the differences, the Standard version offers Photo recovery while the professional offers both the photo and JPEG repair option and the most beefed up premium version offers Video repair too in addition to the standard and professional features. You can choose the one based on your needs. For just recovery of photos and videos, we will recommend the standard version.

Conclusion

The Stellar Photo Recovery is a great utility software, comes with a simple and minimal design, runs even on low-end computers and does exactly what it claims to. Especially, the live preview feature impressed us a lot. Also, the software is super stable and we didn’t experience any lagging or freezing issues while heavy operations.

We have tested the software up to its potential and came to a conclusion that yes, it is definitely worth the purchase in emergency situations or when you badly want the file that you just deleted in hurry of doing something else. However, we would suggest you to first use the free version once and then move to the premium plans. It is a must have software if you’re someone working in media or related businesses.