Recover Photos from PC or Mac hard drive or External HDD using Stellar Photo Recovery
World or National Photography day is almost here and this day should not be spoiled for us passionate photographers due to a malfunctioning hard disk or a mistaken erasure of our best clicked photographs. Today we review Stellar Photo Recovery, a data recovery software that can your first help to recover your photos.
Keeping backups of your photographs in multiple drives, buying online storage for the most precious photographs and filling up whole storage racks with disk drives; this all is normal behavior for any professional photographer or a photography enthusiast. While this might sound being overly protective about our photos to those who don't make much use of memory cards, flash drives or external hard drives, but ask anyone like us who has millions of photos on storage. Only we know how frequently we lose our images due to device malfunction or our own mistakes and the efforts we have to take to get them back. Yes, that's right! We just can't lose those photos which we have spent hours or days capturing while waiting for the right moment and selecting that one out of the hundred shots.
But sometimes, images are not backed up, copies are not yet created and a click on the wrong thumbnail leads to disaster. With World Photography around the corner, it is the right time to make an investment on a utility that can bring back those deleted photos or photos lost due to a disk format. Today we are reviewing Stellar Photo Recovery, a software tool that can detect and recover deleted files or files recently lost due to a disk format/corruption.Feature highlights
Hands on review
While we will be reviewing the Windows version in this article, the features and recovery steps are the same on Mac.
Stellar Photo Recovery software is a small installation package and is available for both Mac and Windows. Once you have installed the package, start the program from the Start menu or from the shortcut created on the desktop.
The main screen will give you the option to search for the type of file you want to recover. As you can see in the image, you can recover other media files to with this tool but we will be focusing only on the Photos recovery performance of Stellar Photo Recovery. Although, if you buy this Photo Recovery software, you can use it for both Video and Audio recovery with the same steps are described below.
Select the Photos recovery option on the software interface. Stellar Photo Recovery claims to recover all types of photos formats including JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PSD, INDD, PSP, PCT, and JP2 and more. The second window will show you the drive or disk you want to run a scan on for recovering images.
On this screen, you can see all the storage attached to your PC including any external hard drive or a memory card or a device like a camera. Before you select the drive or disk you want to hit the Scan button for, have a look at the Deep Scan and Advanced Settings available for the scan.
Deep Scan: Enabling this option will help you recover files from drives which are not being properly read by your computer and might be corrupted. It runs a thorough scan and searches for all files which can be recovered no matter when they were deleted.
Advanced Settings
This section contains the2 settings: 
Turn ON preview: Enabling this option generates a preview of files types and their count when the file scan is running. While this would have been a great feature if we could see the deleted/corrupt file was found, currently, it shows only the file types recovered and their numbers which doesn't serve much purpose. Showing the file names during scan could have helped limit the scan period since we could have stopped the scan once the file we are looking for is found.
Preview of corrupt files: This will let you see the files which are in corrupt state and you can decide if it is worthwhile recovering those files.
Hit the scan button after enabling or disabling these options. Depending on the disk size it has to scan, an approximate time is shown that will be taken to see which all files can be recovered and generate a list of them.
Once the scan is complete, you can see the files recovered in the Tree view of the left side panel of the software. Click on one of the image file types and in the main screen, a list of those file types will be populated.
Select all the images you want to recover by using the Checkbox and click on the Recover button. You will be prompted to select the location where you want to save the recovered files from the disk. Enter the location and click on Start Saving button to start recovering the files.
Wrap up
On this World Photography Day, we highly recommend buying the best Photo Recovery software and Stellar Photo Recovery is one of the best choices available in the market. Accidents do happen, but it doesn't mean that you necessarily have to deal with a loss in terms of losing you hard-earned shots. Make a good investment in terms of buying a good utility right now!
