A few weeks ago I was contacted by the great team at Stellar who asked me to check out their Photo Recovery Software that would be useful to our audience. So I agreed to check out their software as I had previously used other recovery software when I accidentally deleted and formatted my memory card.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a recovery software that can scan your hard disk and memory cards to recover any digital media like Photos, Audio and Video files.

As compared to other software, I found the user interface is very simple and intuitive that you can get started without having the need to review the manual or instructions at all.

Installation of the software is pretty easy, I am using a Mac so I simply download the zip file, unzip the .DMG. Double click to open it and then follow the prompts to install the Photo Recovery Software. If you are using Windows you can get the compatible version here.

When you find yourself in a situation where you have lost your images accidentally or maliciously deleted from your device, the first thing you want to do is prevent usage of the device. You don’t want any subsequent writes to your device reduce your chances of recovering your data successfully.

Double click the Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery software icon to launch the software.

Select the storage device you want to recover the media files from and select the types of media to recover such as; Photo, Audio or Video.

You can also select Advanced settings and specifically select the file type or types you wish to recover from.

In my case I was only looking to search for Canon Raw (CR2) files that I had accidentally deleted by formatting the card.

Once you have selected the file types click on Ok and then Scan button to start the scan.

As the software has to do a sector level scan (essentially read all the 0s and 1s on the device) this process can take some time to complete depending upon the size of the media and types of files its searching for.

The 32GB SD Card took about 10mins to scan for the CR2 files.

Once the scan is completed, you will see the list of media files recovered by the Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery. You can preview the images to ensure you are recovering the correct file and the expected file size matches.

You will also see the total data recovered by the software and the total number of files. In this case it found 6.30 GB and 229 Files.

You have the option to recover all files or selectively choose the media files you want to recover. Click on Recover to start the recovery process.

Select the destination of where you want to have the recovered files saved. Watch the magic happen as the software recovers all the files selected above onto your computer.

Any magically the files are recovered from the media.

In my case it seemed that the recovered files were more than originally indicated. Total recovered files were 690 even though the scan showed 229 files found in the scan. Nonetheless the 229 files that I was after were recovered successfully, in addition I found various other small raw files that were copies of the originals but smaller in size. Maybe something the camera does as it writes the photos on the memory card.

You can download and purchase the software from their website from US $49 for either Windows or Mac.