Stellar Photo Recovery
Recover deleted images with this “search and rescue” app
From $39.99/year From Stellar, stellarinfo.com
Needs OS X 10.7 or later
Photos and videos capture unique moments in time. However, we can occasionally lose some of our precious digital assets. We might drop a folder of photos into Trash and empty it (or format a memory card to create space for a new shoot) before realizing that we hadn’t imported all of our assets into Photos.
In both of these scenarios there is hope of recovering the deleted shots. When you format a camera’s SD card you remove the index of its contents, freeing the camera to write over the existing data. Stellar Photo Recovery can trawl through the formatted card (or an external hard drive) to identify and recover “erased” clips and stills.
It’s easy to use. After launching the app you can toggle on or off the file types you want to recover (such as Photos, Audio, or Video). And you can choose a location to scan (such as an SD card plugged into your Mac). Stellar will then let you recover lost files to a desired destination.
A test scan of our formatted 64GB SD card took a few seconds and recovered 61 missing Raw files (1.24GB). We then performed a Deep Scan. After a nine–minute trawl Stellar fished up an impressive 224 files, weighing in at 3.61GB. Although more effective, a Deep Scan can take a long time, especially when faced with terabytes of data. Fortunately, you can create filters to focus Stellar’s search. For example, you may only want to recover Canon raw files, so you can set the filter to make Stellar look for .CR2 files. You can also tell Stellar not to create a preview of each file to speed up the search.
Stellar offers three annual licensing plans: Standard ($39.99), Professional ($55.99), and Premium ($69.99). The Standard plan lacks the ability to repair corrupt photos, so you should consider going Professional for this option. The Premium plan could prove useful if you need to repair corrupt video clips.
We had one teething problem: when we launched Stellar from the dock it couldn’t recognize any of the attached drives and wasn’t able to recover any data. But when launching it from the Applications folder we were asked to type in our Mac’s password to give the app permission to make changes. It then worked perfectly.
THE BOTTOM LINE. The annual fee may seem high, but irreplaceable clips and stills are priceless!