Stellar Photo Recovery Review

Accidentally deleted your photo in a memory card can be a disaster. Especially after you just finished an important shooting and yet to transfer the photos into your computer or hard disk. That’s the time that we urgently need help from a Photo Recovery Software.

I have the chance to review one of the popular Photo Recovery Software, which is the Stellar Photo Recovery Standard edition. In this article, I’m going to share with you my thoughts about the software user experience and performance in photo recovery.

Supported file format

Let’s start with what can Stellar Recovery software recover first.

The latest version of Stellar Recovery software is version 9.0. It allows you to recover photos from digital cameras, memory cards, SD cards, USB Sticks/Flash drive, external/internal hard drives. Currently, the supported photo file formats are Canon (CR2 /CRW), EPSON (ERF), Fujifilm (RAF), Kodak (K25 /KDC /DCR), Konica Minolta (MRW), Mamiya (MOS), Mamiya (MEF), Nikon (NEF, NRW), Olympus (ORF), Panasonic (Raw), Pentax (PEF), Sony (SR2, ARW, SRF), Sigma (X3F), DNG, DJVU, PGM, Adobe EPS (Mac), Adobe EPS (Windows), TGA, JPEG, TIFF (Motorola and Intel), BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD, INDD, PSP, PCT, and JP2.

Other than recovering photos, the software also able to recover deleted Audio and Video files for MP4, 3GP, AVI, MPEG, Matroska Video File (MKV), AVCHD Video File (MTS), Divx Encoded Movie File (DIVX), MOI Video File, Video Object File (VOB), OGG,OGM, 3G2, ASX, MTS, AJP, F4V, VID, TOD, HDMOV, MOV, MQV, M4B, M4V, WMV, MXF movies and SVI. Supported Audio file formats are RPS, MP3, AU, WAV, MIDI, OGG, AIFF, RM, WMA, RA, M4P, M4A, ACD, AMR, AT3, CAFF, DSS, IFF, M4R, NRA, and SND files.

Besides that, the software also claimed to be able to work smoothly with files size of more than 5 TB, which is a lot!

Scanning process

The Stellar Recovery Software is easy to use, even for a first-timer like me. When I first opened the software, it showed me a list of drives that are accessible on my laptop. What I need to do is pick a drive do the scanning, the software will automatically search for any available file for recovery.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the “NIKON D750” drive is my 64GB SD memory card. There were 988 photos stored in the memory card, with a total of 25.6GB file size. The memory card was formatted, and I was trying to recover all the photos from this formatted memory card

I started the process by clicking on the Scan button. The software scanned through the memory card but unable to discover any file, it then automatically switched to Deep Scan mode and continuing with further scanning.

The Deep Scan took 14 minutes and 17 seconds to complete scanning the memory card. It is faster than I thought, considered that it is a 64GB memory card.

Upon the complete scanning, the software will show you a list of deleted folders and files that it found. It also organized the files into different folders based on the file types.

One thing I like about Stellar Photo Recovery is that it can provide the preview of those deleted files. That’s a great feature, and I would be able to identify and restore only the wanted photos, instead of restoring everything blindly and do the filtering later.

Recovery process

Now, to recover the files, I selected only NEF and JPEG files and then clicked on Recover button. After that, I chose a destination location and started the recovering process.

The recovering took around 16 minutes to complete 988 photos with a total of 25.6 GB file size. I didn’t make a detailed comparison with any other recovery software on this, but personally, I think the recovering speed is fast.

I did a bit verification; all those files are perfectly restored without any of them corrupted during the recovering process, awesome!

Conclusion

Frankly, I like Stellar Photo Recovery software. It is very straightforward to use, supported various Raw file formats with preview, and also supported other Audio & Video file formats. Speed-wise, relatively fast scanning speed and recovering speed. It is the type of recovery software I would like to have, especially as a Photographer.

Price

Now, let’s talk about how much is the software cost.

Stellar Photo Recovery offers three different editions: Standard, Professional and Premium. (There’s also a trial version if you want to give it a try first before making up your mind.) All three editions can recover photo, video & music files. The Professional edition provides additional features in repairing corrupt photo and extracts thumbnail. The Premium edition can do what Professional edition can do and able to repair corrupt video and support more file formats.

If you are interested in getting the software, you can go to its website at www.stellarinfo.com here.

That’s all for this article. See you! 🙂

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