Stellar Photo Recovery Software Review

There are at least a dozen popular photo recovery software available for desktop computers. While most cost between $50 and $100 USD, some fully functional free programs exist too. To justify itself, software must outperform its peers. Similarly to most other reviews here at Neocamera, this evaluation is divided into three categories: Features, Usability and Performance.

Features

The Stellar Photo Recovery feature-set is quite comprehensive, even in the base Standard edition. This includes support for a wide range of file-formats, including many unique used by photographers. The complete list, including those stated in the introduction, are listed on the Stellar Photo Recovery product page. It also supports a large number of video formats, including MPG-4, Quicktime and AVCHD. All digital cameras save videos in one of these three formats. There are also 20 audio file-formats supported.

This software is capable of recovering multi-media files from a wide array of storage hardware. As expected for a product aimed at photographers, it supports nearly all memory-cards. The only notable exception is CF Express, a modern high-bandwidth format used by some professional-grade digital cameras. Additionally, it can efficiently handle both built-in SSD and HDD, plus external external drives and USB keys.

One rarely seen feature is recovery from encrypted disks. The official product page claims that this works with BitLocker on all major brands of devices. These devices are frequently used by modern laptops. Uniquely it can create an image for a subset of media down to sector-level granularity. In addition to its rich media and hardware support, Stellar Photo Recovery can handle FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, HFS+, BTRFS and APFS file-systems. For photographers, ExFAT is now the most commonly used yet many other recovery software struggle with it.

Data recovery takes exponentially longer with larger media. There is no way around this since there are more data blocks to consider when reconstructing images. It can take hours or days to scan large media. For this reason, one of the most awesome feature of Stellar Photo Recovery is its ability to pause and resume a scan. It can even preview files while scanning, so that users can stop it once they have found specific images.

The Pause & Resume Scan feature with parallel preview is an incredibly effective time-saver when working with large storage!

The Professional and Premium versions of the software also add corruption repair to their feature-list. This is very useful to handle bad sectors on low-quality and aging devices. Other software rarely handle this since such files are not missing.

Ease of Use

Stellar appears to have put a good deal of effort in presenting the user with a simple and intuitively user-interface. Starting with the Installation process, every step is simple. During installation, on a Windows system, the user only sees three prompts: Modify System permission, acceptance to the License Agreement and selecting the destination folder. Two optional check boxes are presented: One to create a desktop shortcut and the other to launch the program. The whole process takes under one minute, plus the time everyone takes to read the license agreement! When finished, it automatically launches a tutorial in a browser.

The outcome of the installation is clean. Just one software installed with no bundled bloatware or background services permanently consuming resources. A virus scan of the downloaded software passes too. One minor annoyance though is that the Windows UAC dialog appears on every launch.

The user interface is organized into multiple tree structures. The top-level separates different media. Below it are filesystem folders which are split by file-format at the leaf. This makes allows user to narrow down their search scope but each final list can get very long. There is no way to filter below that, only very basic sorting is possible.

Useful progress feedback is shown throughout the recovery. There is a clear visual indicator of progress which updates incrementally. A small overlay can be opened to show more details about the scan. The bottom of the user-interface shows the elapsed time and universal Pause and Stop buttons allow users to control execution. The Pause feature is particularly useful to allow users to run another intensive software when required.

Extra options appear contextually. When scanning an XQD card, there is a checkbox to enable Deep Scanning. This is a slower process that can discover more files. However, it is unclear under which circumstances the option is offered since this option was not showing when recovering from an SDXC card.

Users select files to recover via checkboxes before pressing the large Recover button at the bottom of the user-interface. At that point, the software shows a dialog to select the folder where to save them. When using the software repeatedly, it unfortunately forces the user to navigate to the destination folder on every recovery. This can get tedious yet is a minor issue as most people should not need to recover files that often.

Performance

The ultimate value of photo recovery software is its ability to restore images. Although it is normal that data recovery software cannot always restore images, most should be able to recover a high percentage of images right after a delete or quick-format. Any write operation after deletion though can cause unrecoverable loss. For this reason, all data recovery software save recovered files to different device than the one from which they were recovered.

To assess the performance of Stellar Photo Recovery, we tested multiple reproducible scenarios with it and repeated the same experiment with Photorec. This particular software is the most capable among free software. It handles plenty of image formats via a tedious interface that requires expert-level knowledge to configure. Here we discuss two typical scenarios.

First, a 32GB SDXC UHS-II card format as FAT32 was filled with 600 images from a pair of Fujifilm Mirrorless Digital Cameras. The card was then formatted using Quick-Format on a Panasonic LX100 II. For the second case, a 32GB XQD card formatted as ExFAT was filled with 600 images plus 10 videos captured by a Nikon camera and then the same camera was used to Delete All files. These two scenarios cover the two most common user errors on the two most used filesystems supported by digital cameras.

In both cases, Stellar Photo Recovery clearly demonstrated how fast it is. It performed an initial scan lasting 46 seconds on the SDXC card and 158s on the XQD. This is oddly inverted from expectations since the SDHX card has a 300 MB/s bandwidth while the XQD has 440 MB/s. The likely culprit is the filesystem since other software also perform consistently slower with ExFAT compared to FAT.

The full scanning phase followed. That took 5 minutes 40 seconds on the SDXC card and 6 minutes exactly on the XQD. The status showed that 6 recovery passed where performed on FAT and 7 on ExFAT. Photorec on the other hand spent 14 minutes recovering from the SDXC card and a whopping 45 minutes with the XQD.

Clearly the winner in terms of speed is Stellar Photo Recovery. It also has a significant time-saving advance since it allows users to preview images during the scan, something that is impossible to do with Photorec. These tests also confirm that the preview matches closely the recovery outcome. In other words, then a complete image preview is shown, the complete image is recoverable. Conversely, when a corrupted preview appears, the corresponding image was not recoverable. This is a crucial point as some software can show a correct preview while not being able to perform recovery correctly. There a few exceptions to this which are discussed below.

From the formatted FAT32 filesystem, Stellar Photo Recovery managed to identify 505 files with a mix of JPG and RAW files. In this case, 66% of files were recovered correctly. This is lower than expected. It is apparent that this software struggles with large images. There is a warning shown before generating such previews, as shown below. Clicking Proceed shows a truncated preview and the software was unable to recover any images, whether JPEG or RAW, taken by the Fujifilm GFX100 II
Fujifilm GFX100 II. It has no issue though with images on the same memory-card from the Fujifilm X100VI
Fujifilm X100VI.

Interestingly Photorec had a completely different issue. It was capable of recovering all JPEG images from the set plus embedded JPEGs from Fujifilm RAW files and their thumbnails. However, it did not recover any Fujifilm RAW files. This led to the bizarre case of it saving 840 images! After culling unusably small thumbnails, 280 correctly recovered images were found, plus 280 preview images. Those are 8 MP images instead of full 100 MP ones produced by the GFX100 II but are easily recognizable.

The second scenario, where all images were deleted instead of quick-formatted, resulted in greater data loss. This time Stellar Photo Recovery listed 497 images and 8 videos. After recovering for 12 minutes, 25% of JPEG images were successfully restored. Of the 10 videos, 6 were fully recovered, 2 more were extracted yet truncated and 2 were not listed at all. Running Photorec on the same memory card produced a similar outcome with 29% of photos recovered but no videos.

Consider the recovery capabilities of these two software a draw. However, given that Stellar Photo Recovery is significantly faster, supports many more data formats and is capable with previewing while scanning, it is the better option for the majority of users.