Data Recovery Digest

Here’s the situation: all of your data got damaged. You ran a recovery program and, luckily, got the majority of your files back, including your pictures. However, when going through your pictures, you’ve discovered that some of them are corrupted. Perhaps the image doesn’t open, or it displays the wrong colours or it is all jumbled. This means you have a corrupted image file. What can you do about it?

Luckily, there is support at hand. There are various products available online that will help repair your image files. A lot of these are paid products, but if these images are valuable to you then it’s probably going to be a good investment. Handily, a lot of them will offer trial versions, offering you a look at how well your images might be recovered before laying down the cash.

TechRadar took a look at at some of the programs available and scored them depending on how well they recovered the images. This article will examine the top three programs (since some of them had a 0% success rate) which you can try on your own images.

PixRecovery 3.0

According to TechRadar’s tests, PixRecovery 3.0 had an image recovery rate of 51.8%. This program is capable of processing multiple pictures at the same time and can handle more problems than some of its competitors. It also supports a wide range of file formats, including JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG.

You can direct where you want each image to save to and the trial version also lets you see how successful recovery will be. However, it will put a big watermark over it (so you don’t simply use the trial version without paying), which can make it harder to recover.

At $49, it’s priced fairly reasonably and its support of a wide range of image formats makes it a good choice.

Stellar Phoenix JPEG Repair 1.0.0.2

As the name suggests, this program only supports JPEG image files. As such, it comes at a cheaper price point of $39.

TechRadar report that the program had a 62.5% image recovery rate, so if you only have JPEG files that need recovering then this is the better choice over PixRecovery.

Stellar Phoenix JPEG Repair offers support for thumbnail extraction, which means that even if the image can’t be repaired then at least you’ll have a smaller resolution view of it.

You simply add the files to the list, click ‘Repair’ and the program does its magic. The watermark is only text, so it’s quite good to see how successful recovery will be.

Picture Doctor 2.0

This program received the highest image recovery rate (albeit only slightly) from TechRadar with 64.3%. However, it is the most expensive, with a costly price point of $99.50.

It’s simple and easy to use and has a trial version, but this places a black rectangle over a lot of the image, making it tricky to judge the successfulness of recovery.

Picture Doctor only recovers JPEG and PSD files and then converts them all into BMP once recovered.