Recovering images with Disk Drill is a piece of cake because all you need to do is click the Recover button and wait for the photo recovery software to take care of the rest. Included with Disk Drill are multiple extra tools intended to safeguard your images and other files against data loss and help you keep your storage devices in good shape.
Judging by its name, you might think that the only purpose of PhotoRec is to recover images, but that’s not the case. In fact, PhotoRec can recover hundreds of file formats from FAT, NTFS, exFAT, ext2/ext3/ext4, and HFS+ uses read-only access. Make sure to also check out TestDisk, a companion to PhotoRec whose purpose is to recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again.
Recuva used to be completely free, but that changed when its developer was acquired by Avast. After the acquisition, a Pro version of Recuva was introduced, featuring virtual hard drive support, automatic updates, and premium customer support. Paying for extra features and premium support would be fine if Recuva was still in active development. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, which is why we recommend only the basic version, which is still available for free.
Stellar Photo Recovery works even with extremely large storage devices, and it can instantly obtain SMART information of your storage device, volume, or partition. Its user-friendly interface takes no time getting use to, and all features supported by this photo recovery software are presented in such a way that even users with minimum data recovery experience can figure them out on their own.
Remo Recover supports all Windows file system (NTFS, NTFS5, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT), as well as file systems used by Mac computers (HFS, HFS+, APFS). You can save your sessions for later and resume them at any later point in time.
The company behind CardRecovery, WinRecovery Software, has been developing data recovery software solutions for many years, and its unique SmartScan technology can quickly diagnose difficult data loss situations and provide the most optimal undelete method.
Since the very first version, Picture Rescue users have been praising its intuitive user interface and excellent usability. All recoverable pictures are displayed as pictures, so you can easily find those that you want to recover, select them, and get them back with a single click.
Hard drives, memory cards, USB flash drives, and other commonly used storage devices are supported, and all you need to do is select your device and initiate a scan. RecoverIt Photo Recovery will then list all recovered files so that you can choose exactly what you want to undelete and what you want to leave behind.
Exif Untrasher is localized in English, German, French, and Italian, and you can download it free of charge directly from Carsten Blüm’s personal website. Just like when installing all other apps that don’t come from the App Store, make sure to enable the installation of the app from the Settings & Privacy menu in System Preferences.
The basic version of EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard can be downloaded for free and used to recover up to 2 GB. Absolutely no computer skills are needed to complete a recovery job with this photo recovery software, and you can preview files before restoration so that you don’t waste the generous data limit on pictures you don’t care about.
Easy Digital Photo Recovery also doesn’t officially support Windows 10, but it seems to run on the operating system just fine. You can download a demo version of this software application for free, but be ready to pay $59 for a personal license and $99 for a business license.
Recover My Photos can recover deleted or lost images and videos from memory cards, USB flash drives, hard drives, and other storage devices - even if they’ve been formatted. The retrieval process consists of just four steps, so most users should be able to figure it out without any help.
Disk Doctors Photo Recovery supports common lossy and lossless image file formats (BMP, PNG, TIF, TIFF, JPEG, JPG, GIF, PSD), as well as RAW image file formats used by leading camera manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Minolta, and others. You can save sessions and continue from where you left off.
In addition to common image file formats, such as JPG, PNG, and GIF, Odboso Photo Retrieval also supports several RAW image file formats and video file formats, and it can recover them from all standard storage devices. Windows 10 isn’t officially supported, but we didn’t experience any issues during our testing.
Thanks to its freeware license, you can download Undelete 360 free of charge and use it without any limitations. Unfortunately, the developers of this picture recovery software application released the last update in 2010. For the time being, Undelete 360 runs just fine on Windows 10, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that it won’t stop running in the future because the operating system isn’t officially supported.
JPEG was introduced in 1992 as one of the first image file formats to use the discrete cosine transform (DCT) technique for lossy compression. This technique, which was first proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972, makes it possible to compress image files down to much smaller file sizes. JPEG arrived right when the internet was just starting to take off, which only accelerated its adoption. To this day, it remains the most popular format for containing lossy and compressed image data.
To determine if you need a picture recovery software application to recover your deleted photos, look inside the Trash folder on macOS or the Recycle Bin on Windows.
To recover deleted photos from the Trash folder on macOS:
To recovery deleted photos from the Recycle Bin on Windows:
After testing 15 different photo recovery software applications, we came to the conclusion that Disk Drill is the best choice for SD card recovery. Not only does it support all members of the SD memory card family, but it also works on both Windows and macOS. Recovering photos with Disk Drill takes just a few clicks, and you can preview all popular image file formats.
Disk Drill is the best free photo recovery software. Its advanced algorithms can recover hundreds of different file types from all major storage devices and file systems. Included in the free version of Disk Drill are two useful data protection tools - Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery - and they can help you never lose important photos ever again. Disk Drill has been in development for many years, and it has been successfully used by millions of users all around the world.