Losing the personal collection of photos is such a painful situation, and is quite unacceptable for everyone. Out of a number of photo recovery tools available in the market, it is quite hard to decide which one is efficient and best suites your requirements. Well, you do not have to bother, as we are here to help you choose the one that best suits your needs.

Well, the demand for an efficient and reliable photo recovery tool brings Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery v6.0 into play, which is the brand new and more powerful version of the photo recovery software designed and marketed by Stellar Data Recovery – The Ranked #1 Data Recovery Company for its Data Recovery Products and Services. Well, since I cannot consider even the best to perform the best every time, so I will be reviewing Stellar’s photo recovery v6.0 software to figure out if it is indeed the best, or it is just like the rest.

Launching the software displays a progressing screen, as shown below:

The software home screen has three engrafted modules, viz. ‘Recover Photo, Audio, & Video’, ‘Create Image’, and ‘Resume Recovery’ as shown in the screenshot below: 

Recover Photo, Audio & Video

‘Recover Photo, Audio & Video’ is the prime module of the software, which takes you to another screen when clicked.

Here, as mentioned – Select Media for Recovery – select a logical volume that you want to scan, and then click the ‘Scan Now’ button. The process involves scanning the selected volume thoroughly for Photo, Audio, and Video (both lost and those are still there).

While the drive is being scanned, the software generates a tree of the folders in the volume, and creates an on the fly preview of the photos it finds. Well, you have to wait until the scanning finishes, and then a pop-up message (as shown below) appears when it is done!

Upon finishing the drive scan successfully, the software generates the scan result in three different views, i.e. ‘Thumbnail View’, ‘List View’, and ‘CoverFlow View’ and arranges the scanned folders in three different lists, i.e. Classic List, File List, and Deleted List. Click a list to preview.

The Classic List of the software contains all the folders in the scanned drive arranged in a tree view. As you can see in the screenshot below, the folders with a cross sign under the parent folder ‘Lost Folder(s)’ are deleted ones. Selecting a folder in the tree reveals its contents (or sub folders) at the right and you can preview them one by one by selecting in the bottom-right pane.

The tree in the File List mode is quite short and contains only three items, i.e. Video, Photos, and Audio. To reveal the contents of a folder, highlight it at the left and select one item in the bottom right pane to preview it. Each folder contains both original and deleted items, where deleted ones are marked with a cross sign.

Clicking Deleted List in the left pane prompts a pop-up message, as shown below:

The Deleted List contains the items that are no longer available in the scanned drive. The list previews the recovered items with their original file names, i.e. the name given to them when they were created, thereby making deleted items’ recovery quite easier than ever before.

Clicking the Recover button requires choosing a location to save the recovered files.

Advanced Scan

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery features ‘Advanced Scan’ that facilitates scanning the selected drive for specific file types for all three files, i.e. Photo, Audio, and Video. 

In the File List tab, you have two options – ‘Select All’ and ‘Unselect All’ file formats for Photo, Audio, and Video.

Moreover, the software has a separate option – Select Range – to scan only the selected area of the chosen drive.

Clicking the Scan Now button starts scanning the selected area (if selected) of the chosen drive for specific file types for the selected item, i.e. Photo, Audio, and Video.

Once Advanced Scan is completed, you get a pop-up message notifying the same as below:

Preview the recovered contents and click the Recover button to save them.

In case you do not want to save recovered data right after the scan, you can save the scanned information, and can continue with it later at any time. 

For this, click the Back button and then click ‘Yes’ to save it as a DAT file at a selected location.

Create Image

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery facilitates creating image of a selected logical drive (volume) or the entire physical drive (hard drive) by scanning it thoroughly. Saving the image of one drive requires another drive to save it as an .img file, which can be used to resume the recovery process later at any time without scanning the same drive again.

After selecting a logical drive, click the Continue button to select a location to save it with a default name in a format, i.e. drive name (drive file format, drive size), e.g. D (NTFS, 114.05 GB).

To image the selected region of a volume or the hard drive, select the volume and then click the ‘Select Region’ button.

Move the sliders to select the specific region of the chosen drive and click OK. Click the Continue button to choose a location and proceed to image it.

Resume Recovery

Using the Resume Recovery module of Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery software requires selecting a previously saved Scan Information (*.DAT) file or an image (*.img) file of a drive. On the home screen, click Resume Recovery and select a recently created drive image or a scan information file.

Click the Scan button and the software takes you to the same screen where Advanced Recovery option does. 

Choose the specific file formats of Photo, Audio, and/or Video and click the Scan Now button to proceed.

What’s New in Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery v6.0?

Apart from the Deleted List option in scan result window, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery v6.0 has a powerful scan engine that is one of its kinds. The software intelligently scans the selected drive and saves the time at each step, including selecting a file, scanning the selected file, generating the preview of the selected file’s contents, and saving the recovered data. Moreover, the software now has gained support for HD MOV file format, which is quite common for digital camera, and HD camera like DSLRs.

The software has some newly added image formats, i.e. Paint Shop Pro Image File (PSP), Mamiya (MOS), and Picture File (PCT). Newly added video format support includes AVCHD Video File (MTS), Divx Encoded Movie File (DIVX), Matroska Video File (MKV), MOI Video File, OGG Media Player (OGM), Video Object File (VOB), 3G2, and ASX.

The best thing of the software is that is it compatible with a range of Windows Operating Systems, i.e. Windows XP to the latest Windows 8 and CPU configurations.

Home page:

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery Software v6.0 Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery Software v6.0 (Windows) Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery (Mac) v6.0 Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery Software v6.0 (Mac)

Pros

• Simple and User-friendly interface
• Do-it-yourself software
• Powerful scan engine
• Supports HD video files
• Time saving utility
• Compatible with Windows XP to Windows 8
• Saves recovered files with their original names given at the time they were created

Cons

• A bit confusing in Advanced Scan option to ‘Select All’ and ‘Unselect All’ file types

More information:

• Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery Software v6.0 (Windows).
• Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery Software v6.0 (Mac).

Testing Environments

Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8

Primary Memory: 1GB, 2GB, 4GB

Processor: Dual Core, Core2Duo, Core i5

Performance Ranking

According to the performance on different operating system platforms, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery v6.0 is a great tool to have. Overall performance scaling parameters collectively give it a 4.6/5.0.

Verdict: “Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery 6.0 is an ideal software to recover lost and deleted multimedia files with option to add new file types to its list. The tool is good for general costumers as well as professionals.”

Author Bio:

My name is Amit. I work as a data recovery expert and love to test different data recovery software. I have tested  software from Stellar Information  Technology, Win Data Recovery, Nucleus Data recovery and many more.