Hopefully, you’ve never experienced that heart-stopping moment when you realised you’ve lost all your photos from a memory card or hard disk. If you have, you’ll know that you’d probably do almost anything to salvage the situation, especially if the corrupted card contains client photos.
Salvage operations can be costly, but luckily, there are alternative options. Stellar Photo Recovery might be the tool that hopefully you won’t ever need, until you do!
What Does Stellar Photo Recovery Do?
The newly updated Stellar Photo Recovery 12 is aimed at photographers, videographers, and content creators dealing with everything from a simple file deletion to complete drive failure. It’s designed to retrieve lost or deleted images, videos, and audio files from various storage devices. It supports a wide array of file formats and can recover data from internal drives, external hard disks, SSDs, memory cards (SD, CF, etc.), and even severely corrupted partitions.
Once the scan’s done, you can preview what’s been found (photos, videos, audio files), and restore what you need. You can also save scan sessions and resume them later, which is great when you’re working with large drives or more complicated recovery jobs.
Stellar supports recovery for over 100 file types by default and lets users add their own if something’s missing. Photographers will appreciate that it recovers thumbnails and, where available, metadata like original timestamps, camera model, resolution, and file names.
Deep Scanning & RAW Recovery
For the tougher jobs, there’s a ‘Deep Scan’ feature that does a signature-based search, which is useful when file system records are toast but the data is still on the disk. It also supports raw recovery based on known file signatures, which can be a lifesaver when the standard scan comes up short.
Usability
The user interface is pretty straightforward and offers different modes for browsing recovered files. There’s also support for pausing and resuming both scanning and recovery, and double-click previews work during scans (not just after), which makes sorting through large recoveries more manageable.
Key Features at a Glance
- Deleted File Recovery – Restores accidentally erased photos and videos.
- RAW & Unallocated Partition Recovery – Retrieves data from damaged, uninitialized, or RAW-formatted drives.
- Deep Scanning – Uses file signature-based searches to maximise recovery in tough cases where normal scans fail.
- Preview Before Recovery – Lets users check recoverable files before saving them.
- Session Saving – Allows pausing and resuming scans to avoid starting over.
- BitLocker Support – Works with encrypted drives.
- Thumbnail & Metadata Recovery – Preserves original timestamps, camera details, and filenames when possible.
- Multiple File Systems – Supports NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, APFS, HFS+, EXT2/3/4, and more.
- Drive Imaging – Creates a disk image for safer recovery attempts.
Price and Availability
Stellar Photo Recovery is available for both Windows and Mac, and there are several different pricing options available. The basic option is free, and will let you recover up to 10 files. After that you can choose from Standard for $49.99 annual subscription, Profession for $59.99, or Premium for $69.99. You can download directly from the website.
While no recovery tool guarantees 100% success (especially with physically damaged drives), Stellar Photo Recovery 12 offers a comprehensive set of features for photographers dealing with data loss. The ability to preview files, resume scans, and handle multiple file systems makes it a practical option for both professionals and hobbyists.
