Top 5 Free Photo Recovery Software Programs

Posted on January 20, 2010 at 5:00 am

At least once in our lives, we all experience a moment of utter idiocy. We click the delete all button on our cameras, thereby destroying precious photos with captured moments impossible to recreate.

Or, we pull the card out of the camera while its still on…corrupting all files on the card. Or we drop our cell phone in the toilet (an occurrence so common that most cell phones have a “flood detection strip” under the battery), frying the motherboard and the enclosed Mini-SD card too.

Regardless of how the files are lost, there are many software programs available to restore treasured pictures.

1. Recuva

Recuva is probably the most user-friendly, and certainly one of the fastest, programs to recover photos. In a recent test, Recuva took less than 3 minutes to scan and retrieve photos from a 300 GB hard drive. It found everything, from temporary internet files to deleted photos from last October.

Recuva will find any kind of file at all, and has special modes for music, documents, videos, and emails, besides the standard photo recovery. The main drawback with Recuva is with disks that are completely corrupted. If Windows does not recognize the disk, Recuva cannot scan it.

Recuva is available from Piriform.com. Be sure to read our full review of the program, How to Recover Accidently Deleted Files.

2. ZAR

ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) does a deeper scan than Recuva, which is useful for disks that are so corrupted that Windows will not recognize them. The scan takes much longer: 4-6 hours for a 2 GB SD card.

The free version of ZAR will only restore photos. If other file types need to be restored, the full version of the program must be purchased. ZAR is available from z-a-recovery.com.

3. CardRecovery

Of all the photo recovery software, this one takes the longest to recover files. A scan of a 2 GB SD card took a whopping 40 hours! But, one great feature with CardRecovery is it displays the files it finds as it finds them. So, if it finds your pictures in the first ten minutes, you can click stop and instantly restore them.

Like ZAR, it will scan a card unrecognized by Windows. It has settings for specific camera types, too. In our test, it scanned for photos from a Canon Rebel XS, which means it looked for .RAW and .JPEG files. Changing the setting to other camera brands changes the file type.

The free version of CardRecovery only allows four complete disk scans—so if deleting needed files is a habit, some of the other software on this list might be a better option. CardRecovery is available from CardRecovery.com.

4. PC Inspector File Recovery

PC Inspector is more like Recuva than ZAR or CardRecovery. It will find files fairly quickly on a disk where photos have simply been deleted, but will not even try to scan a disk that is completely corrupted.

For beginners, this is not the best option on the list. You must know the difference between a logical and physical drive to start, then have a little technical knowledge to tweak the program as you scan. It did find files that were simply deleted from a hard drive in about 25 minutes.

PC Inspector is available from Snapfiles.com.

5. PicaJet Photo Recovery

All of the aforementioned programs strongly suggest or require using a card reader to find deleted photos. PicaJet is the exact opposite—it requires the card to be in the camera to find the photos.

In Windows 7, the program would not detect a Canon Rebel XS. It did detect a non-SLR Canon Powershot, though. It also detected a small Olympus camera. When files are just deleted or formatted, it seems to find them quite easily. Still no luck with the completely corrupted 2 GB SD card, though.

PicaJet Photo Recovery can be downloaded from CNET’s Download.com.

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

Comments

12 Responses to “Top 5 Free Photo Recovery Software Programs”

donny said on : January 20th, 2010 at 8:10 am

Hey, thanks for the list of photo recovery apps, good info to know! God knows I take a huge number of photos and probably will end up deleting some by accident one day.

Henry said on : January 21st, 2010 at 11:06 am

Will these programs work for recovering photos from a hard disk on my computer? I am a bit confused as to which work directly on the memory card and which work on a hard drive. Or do they recover pictures from any type of media? Thanks.

Alfred said on : January 22nd, 2010 at 12:17 pm

that Zar program looks like something I could use on my corrupted hard disk. Thanks for the mention

james said on : January 25th, 2010 at 1:11 am

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is also a good software to recover lost, deleted Photos from Digital Camera, memory card, external hard drive, flash drive and usb drives.

David Levine said on : January 28th, 2010 at 7:50 am

I used Recuva the other day after I deleted some files from an external hard drive and then remembered I had movie files of our cats that I wanted. Recuva scanned the 500 GB hard drive in about 3 minutes and found everything I needed.

Noemi said on : March 19th, 2010 at 7:17 am

I have deleted pictures from my phone SD card, how can I recover them using these programs?

lindy said on : April 3rd, 2010 at 2:59 am

i downloaded recuva. first i was so excited that its the only program i found to be completely free but then when i try it, it can only find one picture. Only one picture out of so many other photos and its an ugly one too. im totally disappointed, do you know any completely free software that is better than recuva? thanks, if you do please let me know, here’s my email ily_moneyy@yahoo.com. Thanks.

Tasha said on : April 25th, 2010 at 9:32 pm

I downloaded Recuva and I was very pleased with their services! I really think people should donate to them because if it wasn’t for them I would be crying my eyes out right now! I recently took photos of my 4 year old daughter’s BDAY and just my luck she got a hold of my camera and deleted all of them!!! I already lost her 1st BDAY photos because I was a dumb ass and used those cheap disposable ones.

Then I moved and left them behind somewhere. So I will never be able to replace those but thanks to Recuva I have her 4th BDAY ones again! Not to mention I said it was photos of her BDAY so I was running a bit low on money and came across Recuva which happens to be completely free!!! I got all my photos recovered (not just one). I tried the CardRecovery one first and it was free to scan and preview your photos that were found but you could not recover them and save them to your computer without paying like 43 dollars!

Thank God I didn’t pay because I was about too but then something told me to look for other software. This is 2010 so I figured there would be something! I didn’t care if I had to do something illegal! I was desperate but thanks again to Recuva I don’t have to worry about going to jail! lol. It is nice to know that there are some people not looking to get rich! I LOVE YOU RECUVA!!!

Golu said on : May 27th, 2010 at 5:16 am

Thanks for the lists of software. RecoverPlus Photo Recovery also not bad.

Katie B said on : May 29th, 2010 at 10:33 pm

I downloaded Recuva and was not pleased – It only recovered one photo of the over 300 that a program that cost me $100 to purchase after it found photos to restore. Am I missing something on this program or did it just not do what you are saying it has done for everyone? I’m not too computer savvy, but I’m also not a money tree, so paying for a photo recovery on a one time circumstance is pointless for me. All I want to do is recover my daughters bday pics from yesterday and her party pics from today….but Recuva isn’t doing that.

Hank said on : June 11th, 2010 at 7:29 am

It’s amazing to see how much random cr*p is actually there. the 3 recovery programs I’ve looked at so far are actually finding the jpgs from web pages I’ve browsed.

CardRecovery isn’t actually free. All you can do is see the pictures, you have to buy it to recover them.

maria gracia said on : June 20th, 2010 at 11:32 am

Hola, necesito algo que sea gratuito! no hay algun programa gratuito para la recuperacion de fotos?!