Wondershare Photo Recovery

Wondershare Photo Recovery aims to provide a quick means of recovering lost, hidden or deleted media files from local hard drives, as well as removable Flash devices, memory cards and digital cameras.

Despite what its name implies, the program does not target images exclusively, but has the ability to restore video and audio files as well, therefore it covers more than expected.

Following the trend of most recovery tools, the application relies on a wizard-based approach that guides you through all the steps of the restore process.

First and foremost, you need to specify the drives /devices to be scanned and furthermore, to configure file filters. The latter allows you to select the formats to look for during the scan, thereby to exclude the ones you do not need.

Format support covers popular image types, such as JPG, TIF, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, CRW, CR2 (Canon), NEF (Nikon), ORF (Olympus) and SR2 (Sony) to name just a few, plus AVI, 3GP, FLV, MPG, ASF, M4V for video files and MP3, OGG, MID, AAC and WMA for audio files.

Once the scan process has been initiated, all that remains to be done is to wait patiently for the results. Note that for large drives the scan process might take a while, a natural consequence of huge amounts of data.

Recovered photos can be previewed using the built-in function, whereas for videos there is no such option. Handling the scan results is easy, since they are automatically categorized by media type, allowing you to select the items to be recovered. The search function is of great help, enabling you to jump to a certain file if you know its name.

Overall, Wondershare Photo Recovery comes across as an intuitive and easy-to-use recovery application, although compared to the competition, it’s got nothing extra that would convince users to choose it over others. The price seems a little steep for its feature set.