5 Best Photo Recovery software | Expert choice

Losing photos is common but recovering them depends on the method or software you select. Finding the best photo recovery software to recover your permanently deleted photos is not easy. On many web pages, you can find a big list of photo recovery tools irrespective of their poor performance. This can create a lot of confusion on what photo recovery software to prioritize for restoring photos, raw images, videos, and other media files.

To help you know what is the best photo recovery software, we have analyzed and tested 5 renowned photo recovery tools on various parameters. Such as user interface, price, speed, compatibility, supported devices, and performance under various data loss scenarios (permanent deletion, corruption, formatting, interruptions while transferring photos, or Recycle Bin recovery). Make use of the pros and cons section specified for each software to find out the best photo recovery software for you and your deleted images.

Which is the best Photo Recovery Software?

1. Remo Recover software

Remo Recover is a user-friendly photo recovery tool to restore photos of any format. Such as PNG, JPEG, BMP, NEF, ORF, raw images, and many more. This tool works with a read-only mode algorithm to get back deleted images, videos, audio files, or documents without any alteration. Moreover, the Remo Photo Recovery tool is free to download and safe to recover photos on various devices. Such as a digital camera, SD card, Windows/ Mac computer, SSD, USB drive, or external hard disk.

Pros:

1. Remo Recover has a dedicated Photo recovery option to restore deleted or lost images from any device.
2. The tool allows you to preview the recovered photos and videos for free even before you actually save them.
3. It easily recovers photos and media files from various data loss scenarios. Such as permanently deleted or lost photos, formatted a drive, corruption, unreadable internal or external device.
4. Remo Photo Recovery tool is compatible with all the versions of Windows and Mac operating systems including the latest Windows 11, 10, and macOS Big Sur.
5. It recovers photos captured on various devices like a digital camera, camcorder, DSLR, CCTV, Drone, Android phone, etc.

Cons:

1. The speed of the scanning time depends on the complexity of the data loss scenario and the amount of data you lost. The speed of the photo recovery process increases if the severity of the photo loss situation is less.
2. This photo recovery tool doesn’t support recovery from the Android phone’s internal memory. However, you can easily get back images from the micro/ SD card of the mobile phone or a camera.

How to recover permanently deleted photos?

Step 1: Launch Remo Recover software on your Windows or Mac computer.

Step 2: Select the Recover Photos option and choose the drive from which you want to restore your deleted photos.
Note: If you are looking to recover photos from an SD card or any other external storage drive, then connect it to your system.

Step 3: Click on the Scan button to start recovering deleted or lost photos. Once the scanning process is completed, you can double-click on the recovered photos to preview them for free.

Step 4: Select the photos you want to get back and click the Save option to restore them to any location of your choice.

2. Recuva

Recuva Photo Recovery tool easily restores deleted files, photos, and compressed data. This photo recovery software has an old-fashioned and a bit complicated user interface. Using this tool, you can easily recover photos from simple data loss scenarios such as photos lost or accidentally deleted.

Pros:

1. Recuva is less expensive than the other photo recovery software.
2. It can easily recover deleted photos and documents from the computer.
3. This software has a Deep Scan option to recover files that cannot be restored using Quick Scan.
4. It is compatible with Windows 8 and its previous version of operating systems.
5. Recuva Photo Recovery has a dedicated option to recover pictures of various formats.

Cons: 

1. It cannot recover entire photos lost under severe data loss scenarios like SD card formatting or corruption, photos lost while transferring, etc.
2. The interface of this photo recovery software is complicated and old-fashioned.
3. It cannot recover photos based on time or specific period.

3. Yodot Photo Recovery tool

Yodot Photo Recovery is an easy-to-use software designed to help novice users to restore photos under various data loss scenarios. It has customized options (Recover Deleted Photos and Recover Lost Photos) for its users to make the photo recovery process simple. The tool is also free from any virus or malware attack and recovers photos captured on any digital camera or camcorder with ease.

Pros:

1. Yodot Photo Recovery software allows you to preview the recovered photos from the computer.
2. It enables you to prioritize the recovery based on the photo file format you want to restore. This can eliminate the recovery of unnecessary file formats.
3. The tool can easily compress the data or photos you want to save in a ZIP file format.  
4. The software is also available for Mac operating systems.

Cons:

1. The tool cannot recover photos from the Android phone or iPhone.
2. Unlike Remo Recover software, its scanning time is much longer.
3. It does not have an Advanced or Deep Scan feature.

4. Easeus Data Recovery software

Easeus Data Recovery is designed with a simple interface to restore data from multiple devices. And it is one of the renowned tools to recover files on a computer. This software doesn’t provide a dedicated option to recover photos since it majorly focuses on data as a whole. However, using the filter, you can sort your photos out of the entire recovered data based on the file extension.

Pros:

1. It can recover photos from a formatted hard drive.
2. It can recover multiple photo file formats. Such as SR2, MRW, DCR, WMF, RAW, SWF, SVG, RAF, and DNG. 
3. Supports photo recovery from FAT 32 and NTFS file systems.
4. It is compatible with Windows 8 and 7.

Cons:

1. There is no dedicated option provided to recover photos compared to Yodot and Remo Photo Recovery.
2. The interface is majorly designed to help users to recover data as a whole. And not to help users to recover a specific data format. Such as photos, videos, audio files, or documents.
3. Easeus photo recovery software cannot save the recovered photos on the same drive.

5. Stellar Photo Recovery software

Stellar Photo Recovery software is designed with a simple user interface. And it can recover various file formats such as photos, audio files, text files, etc. This tool has a Deep Scan feature to recover photos from a camera under various complex scenarios.

Pros:

1. The tool can recover photos from a corrupt or formatted hard drive.
2. It can easily recover raw-photo formats like CR2, RAF, PEF, NRW, K25, SR2, etc.
3. It has Add File Type option that allows users to add the desired file format that is not supported by the software. 
4. Similar to Remo Recover software, the Stellar Photo Recovery tool also supports data recovery from Bitlocker encrypted drive.  
5. It is compatible with Windows 8.1, 8, 7, and its previous versions.

Cons:

1. Stellar photo recovery software takes a long time to restore photos from formatting, corruption, or inaccessible drive.
2. It does not support photo recovery from an iPhone or Android mobile phone.
3. The tool cannot recover photos from two different drives (let’s say D and E drive) at once. 
4. The standard version of this tool doesn’t extract thumbnails of severely corrupt photos. It charges premium pricing to unlock normal features.