Is Stellar Photo Recovery Software Worth It? SlashGear Tested It To Find Out

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So much of modern media, from music to film, is stored as digital content. There are a million and one reasons why doing it this way is more convenient than storing and managing physical content, but there are also certain risks as well. Most of us have had that gut-sinking feeling at one point or another when our computer was conspicuously missing an important file after an update or a crash. It could be a folder holding your wedding photos, recorded audio files for a podcast, or the working file for a YouTube video you spent hours editing.

That's where the Stellar Photo Recovery Software comes into play. This is a specialized photo recovery software that is designed for precisely these types of situations. It works on both PC and Mac computers to recover deleted photos, videos, and audio files from a wide range of different storage devices, including HDD drives, USB drives, flash drives, SD cards, and more. This makes it a great option for general users, but it can be a lifesaver for photographers, content creators, and others who regularly work with important media files.

Stellar sent me this software so I could try it out for myself, and I found the application to be fast, effective, easy-to-use, and capable of finding file types from a number of popular creative software platforms.

One of the first things that hit me when I opened the app was just how simple and easy to navigate the interface window is. The first page asks you to tick the boxes of the types of files you're looking to recover: Photos, Audio, or Videos. This narrows down the search if you're looking for something specific, but you also have the "All Data" option if you'd prefer to search for everything all at once.

The second page asks you which drive you'd like to scan. It automatically detects all of your computer's attached drives and physical disks, even searching thumb drives and other connected external devices. Selecting the drive you'd wish to search initiates a prompt to start the scan. There is also an option to have the application perform a "Deep Scan" on this page. This takes quite a bit longer than the standard scan, but it's worth a shot if your first attempt doesn't recover a specific file that you're looking for.

Once the scan is complete, the interface opens a root menu that shows you all the files it discovered and how they were organized on your computer before they were deleted. The File List tab organizes the discovered files into categories by media type (audio, video, photos, and others) and then sub-organizes them by file type (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.).

Finally, the app also gives you the option to save previous scan results. That way, you don't need to go through the entire scanning process each time you want to recover a file that has been deleted from a given drive.

The Stellar Photo Recovery app worked insanely fast on my computer. It managed to scan my largest 8TB HDD drive in under a minute, and it scanned my smaller SSD drives in just a few seconds. It's worth mentioning, though, that the speed of the app may be partially affected by the processing power and memory of your computer, as well as the read/write speeds of the drive that is being scanned. Even so, I can't imagine it taking too long on any PC with adequate specs to run it. For PCs, it recommends an Intel-compatible x64-based processor (though it worked fine with my AMD Ryzen 7), 8 GB of memory, and at least 25 MB of storage for installation files.

I scanned all four of the drives attached to my computer and every scan managed to discover hundreds of deleted files – some of which dated all the way back to when I first built the PC, five years ago. What's more, the recovery process is easy and gives you a lot of options. You can recover individual files, folders, or entire root directories at the push of a button.

The Stellar Photo Recovery app lets you preview the images, videos, and audio tracks that it has discovered before recovering them back onto your computer's storage. This lets you explore deleted files and select the ones you need without committing to a long recovery process of every file you've ever deleted. You also have the option to decide what drive these files will be recovered to, just in case you'd prefer for them to go somewhere other than their original location.

In terms of what specific file formats you can recover, the app is natively able to discover dozens of photos, audio, and video file types. This includes popular formats such as JPG, GIF,  MP3, WAV,  MOV, and MP4, as well as more niche, proprietary formats that are used in the software designed by major companies such as Adobe, Sony, Nikon, and Black Magic. But even if it doesn't come with the file type you need, there's no need to worry. The software also has a built-in tool that allows you to add new formats. 

Overall, I found the Stellar Photo Recovery Software to be extremely user-friendly, effective, and efficient. I think it's a must-have for anyone looking to recover photos, videos, and audio tracks.