Hands On: When Flash goes crash

After the photos were taken, the card was formatted in the camera before being transferred to the card reader to attempt recovery using each of the applications. The card reader used was the same in each case: Lexar’s Professional UltraDMA dual-slot Compact Flash and SD card reader.

The results
The results can be summed up fairly simply: every application had nearly 100 per cent success at recovery of both Raw and JPEG files. Most were able to retrieve images from earlier sessions as well, but these haven’t been included in the results.

As important as an application’s ability to recover lost data is its ease of use. What follows is a brief explanation of how each of the applications works and how easy it was to recover the lost images on the cards. Since you’re only likely to need to do this rarely, the ease with which you can recover your lost photos using unfamiliar software is an important factor.

Image Rescue 3
Image Rescue 3 takes you step by step through the image recovery process using a wizard-based panel. You can select your camera manufacturer and tell the software what kind of files you’re trying to recover: images, video or audio, and the file type. For Raw formats it provides the options for your camera manufacturer, so if you select Canon, for example, you get cr2, crw, jpg and tif.

The software then scans the card and tells you what it has found. It took around half an hour to scan the 8GB Lexar Compact Flash card; obviously, smaller cards won’t take so long. It’s also faster if you search for fewer file formats; I elected to find all the available still image file formats.

Image Rescue 3 did a good job, recovering all but one of the files. It mistook the Raw.cr2 files for TIFFs and saved them with a .tiff extension, but they still opened as Raw files in Adobe Camera Raw.

Photo Rescue Wizard 3.0
Photo Rescue offers recovery software in several stages: Wizard, Expert and Advanced. I tested the Wizard version, which turned out to be extremely easy to use. The quick recovery option scans your card and presents you with thumbnails of all the recoverable images it can find.

Unlike Image Rescue, Photo Rescue doesn’t give the option to search for specific file types. But it did recover all the files with filenames and correct extensions. The demo version lets you do everything bar save recovered files to disk, for which you need to pay $29.99 for a licence key.

Photo Recovery 3.5
Unlike Image Rescue and Photo Rescue, Photo Recovery isn’t wizard-driven and the interface is a little more involved, though not overly difficult. You have to select your card reader from a drive list and there’s a long, long list of file types of all kinds to select from, not just media files. To make things easier you can select preset groups, such as ‘Canon’. I went with the default All Cameras option.

Photo Recovery did a great job of recovering both the Raw and JPEG images on all the cards. It seemed to have a problem with handling the display of the images, though, and everything slowed to a crawl, making it difficult even to scroll through the list of recovered images. This was at least in part due to the processing requirements of displaying previews for Raw files and is something the other applications suffered from as well, albeit to a lesser extent.

Card Recovery 4.10
Card Recovery is the most expensive of the utilities tested, but it is one of the easiest to use and most efficient. The step-by-step wizard asks you to select the drive letter for the card reader and choosing your camera brand and the file types you want to recover. You don’t need to specify suffixes: just check the box for photos, video and/or sound.

The next step starts the scan and, when that’s complete, you save the recovered files to disk. As with most of the other utilities, you can scan your card using the demo download to see what’s recoverable. If you find what you’re looking for, pay the fee to enable the save function: no gain, no pain, so to speak.