PhotoRescue: digital photo recovery software

Lately, when both a co-worker and a family member accidentally deleted (erased) their digital photos from their camera’s memory cards; they had to turn to a photofinishing lab to get them to recover their lost images. Of course, that cost a lot of money.

Assuming that these labs must use software to recover data, I went on a search of the Internet to see what was out there in the way of offerings to home users.

First, I did a Google search (what else?) for “photo recovery software”. The third entry on the list of almost 13 million pages was http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/ 

Now, I cannot recall why I bypassed the first two entries, after all, the prices of their software were comparable to PhotoRescue. What caught my eye initially was the simple graphic on the PhotoRescue home page:

There, in a nutshell, was the simple process of recovering lost digital images. Very comforting to someone who thinks those precious photos of the new baby or that special trip were lost forever!

Another item that caught my attention was a link on their “Useful Links” page to the Imaging Resource website, which I was already familiar with having purchased my Fuji digital camera based on their review and recommendation.  

Based on these two things, I wrote the folks at DataRescue asking if I could test and review a full copy of PhotoRescue. They responded affirmatively within a day or so.

Armed with my Fuji A205 and 3 different xD memory cards, I first installed the software, which is very small by today’s standards, just over 1MB in size. It would fit nicely on a floppy or a small USB memory stick.

I had already connected my camera via the USB cable to my PC[1] and once PhotoRescue was launched, it immediately recognized the correct drive:

I then clicked ‘OK’ and the recovery scan started.

It finished scanning my 128MB xD card in about 2 minutes or less:

It reports that it found 35 files, but I knew some of these already existed on the card. However, there were a number of them that I had recently deleted for the purposes of this test and PhotoRescue recovered them, placing them in a ‘Found’ folder and displaying previews of the actual file:

 

Impressive! Now, let’s try another card, a 16MB one that I knew contained no images and one that I hadn’t used since I got a larger card over a year ago. It found several dozen images that I had erased off the card before storing it away!

Now, how does one get these images off the memory card and safely on to a PC? By going to File>Save all which prompts you to give a location for PhotoRescue to save the files to.

It doesn’t get much easier than that!

 

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[1] Data Recovery requires access to the full content of the media: this is only possible when the USB Mass Storage protocol is fully implemented and supported by the camera. In other words, only cameras that are spontaneously seen as disk drives will be directly usable for data recovery. Cameras such as Canon’s cameras that are not USB Mass Storage class devices will not be visible to PhotoRescue. In addition to the above restrictions, it should be noted that the recovery of large cards on a slow USB link can take a very long time: cameras running on their own power can unexpectedly shut down during the recovery. That’s why we recommend that a USB 2.0 Card Reader is used for the recovery.

Originally posted:
Updated: December 28, 2005