For photographers, losing photos is a nightmare. It is probably even worse than losing a girlfriend. But don’t worry too much. With an appropriate tool, there is a chance to get your lost photos back. We have collected the tools that you can use to recover deleted photos.
In general, nearly all data recovery software have the capability to recover deleted photos or the lost photos caused by technical issues like an accidentally formatted disk, virus attack, and so on. Technically, when you deleted a photo, the actual data of the photo is not really gone until it was overwritten by other data. Instead, it resides somewhere deep inside your hard drive or memory card. A photo recovery tool will scan your hard drive or memory card to figure out if the photo you are looking for still around.
The vast majority of photo recovery tools only allow you to preview the successfully scanned photos and require you to pay the license to restore them, while some allow you to recover the photos with a certain maximum size.
Here are the tools you can use to recover deleted photos or the lost photos caused by other technical issues.
1. iBoysoft Data Recovery
If you want to only recover a single photo due to accidentally deleted, iBoysoft Data Recovery might is the best tool you can try. You don’t need to spend a dime to recover a single photo since this tool is released as a freemium tool where the free version allows you to recover files up to 1GB. iBoysoft Data Recovery comes with a fancy interface that is extremely easy to use. You can use it to scan photos stored on laptop hard drive or external USB storage.
In addition to restoring accidentally deleted photos, you can also use iBoysoft Data Recovery to recover the lost photos caused by formatted hard drive, deleted partition, corrupted drive, unmountable media, and so on. iBoysoft Data Recovery itself is available for Windows and Mac.
2. Disk Drill
Disk Drill is better known as a partition recovery software, but it is also great to recover deleted photos. After the scanning process is done, you can filter the results to show image files only and recover them. Same as iBoysoft Data Recovery, Disk Drill is also released as a freemium tool with the free version allows you to recover successfully scanned files up to 500MB. Disk Drill is available for Windows and Mac.
Disk Drill also supports external storage. You can, for instance, recover deleted photos from SD card in case you accidentally deleted photos when previewing it on your camera. We have covered how to recover deleted partition on Windows with this tool by the way.
3. Stellar Data Recovery Professional
The most boring part of restoring the lost files is waiting for the process scanning. Particularly if you have large capacity storage to be scanned. Stellar Data Recovery Professional allows you to scan image files only to save you time. You can unselect other file types before start scanning. This way, the scanning process can take less time. Stella Data Recovery also has a fancy interface that is extremely easy to use. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t allow you to recover scanned files for free. You are only allowed to preview your photos and need to enter the license key to restore them. This tool is also available for Windows and Mac. We have also covered Stella Data Recovery Professional in this post.
4. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is a versatile data recovery software. You can use it to restore any kind of data due to any cause. Be it accidentally deleted, hidden, lost partition and so on. This is a nice tool if you are looking for a free tool to recover photos in a large enough number. This tool is not fully free. Instead, it is released as a freemium tool with the free version allows you to recover up to 2GB of files. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard comes with an image previewer to allow you preview a photo before restoring it. We have also covered this tool on this post in case you want to learn more.
5. Recoverit Photo Recovery
Recoverit Photo Recovery is a data recovery software that is designed specifically to restore deleted photos. This is probably the best tool if you are a professional photographer and often lost your photos due to any cause. You can recover the lost photos from computer hard drive, digital cameras, drone cameras, Android phones, memory cards, etc. By default, this tool only scans image files although there are options to scan other file types as well. Another good thing about this tool is that it allows you to recover your photos individually in case you only want to recover a single photo for a certain project.
Recoverit Photo Recovery is available as a freemium software. The free version only allows you to recover 10 photos. You can install Recoverit Photo Recovery on Windows and Mac.
6. MiniTool Photo Recovery
MiniTool Photo Recovery is also great for professional photographers since it is designed specifically to recover the lost photos. You can use this tool to directly recover deleted photos from a digital camera without having to release the memory card. This tool displays the thumbnails of the scanned photos to ease your job in identifying the photos you want to recover. Another good thing is that you can filter the results by file size. MiniTool Photo Recovery is also available as a freemium tool with the free version can be used to recover a maximum of 200MB files. MiniTool Photo Recovery is available for Windows and Mac.
7. Remo Recover
Remo Recover is also capable enough of restoring deleted photos. You can use it to recover deleted photos directly from a digital camera, laptop hard drive or other storage mediums. You can install and use Remove Recover to scan the lost photos for free. However, you need to enter the license key to recover them. In other words, you need to buy the license in order to be able to use this tool. The vast majority of photo recovery tools above support deep scanning mode to perform a deeper scanning. So is Remo Recover. You can install Remo Recover on Windows and Mac.
8. GetDataBack Pro Data Recovery
GetDataBack Pro Data Recovery is another tool that you can use to recover deleted photos or the lost photos caused by other issues. You can use it to restore deleted photos from computer hard drive or external storage. The built-in preview feature allows you to instantly preview a photo before you restore it. GetDataBack Pro Data Recovery is a paid tool. You can use it for free but only for a demo purpose.
9. Hetman Photo Recovery
Hetman Photo Recovery is designed specifically for restoring deleted photos. This tool only scans image files and offers two scanning modes just like other tools above. At the time of writing, Hetman Photo Recovery is only available for Windows. A feature offered by Hetman Photo Recovery that is not available on all tools above is the ability to directly send the restored photos to FTP server. Or, you can also directly burn your photos into a DVD or create an ISO file. Hetman Photo Recovery itself is a paid tool (trial version is available). The scanned photos will be displayed in thumbnails to allow you effortlessly identify the photos you want to restore.