Best Free Photo Recovery Software For Mac

Last updated on June 19th, 2021 at 12:13 pm

Photo recovery software is the answer. This page lists the best 6 picture recovery programs for Windows and Mac, to help you restore lost images from computer safely and quickly. Top 3 photo recovery software for Windows 10/8/7 #1. Apeaksoft Data Recovery ($34.96) #2. MiniTool Photo Recovery (Free) #3. Stellar Photo Recovery ($39.99. The best 100% free photo recovery software is PhotoRec. This open-source application lets you recover an unlimited amount of data from any storage device, and it supports all common image file formats, including JPG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF, just to name a few.

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We all love our photos and save on smartphone, computers, removal hard drives, camera, drone but what happens if one of those device fails or get corrupted and you don’t have a backup or you have deleted photos accidentally by pressing delete button.

Why do images get “Corrupted”? Here are the top 1o reasons

1. Spread of virus in removable storage devices, such as memory card, USB drives.

2. Formatted memory card, flash drive.

3. Accidental deletion of photos

4. Computer suddenly shut down while transferring data

5. Your data is in transfer mode and suddenly you remove the device which can be hard disks, memory card

6. Photo taken when battery is extremely low hence we suggest you should not take photos with low battery

7. Ignore the warnings like “Storage media is full” and still you are saving photos

8. Using the storage medium in multiple devices without formatting

9. Forced and auto ejection of SD Card

10. Removing the memory card without switching off the camera

Hence it’s very essential to take a backup of your data so that you may recover it whenever needed.

Suddenly realized your photos deleted but don’t panic if you don’t have a backup! We found top Photo Recovery Software for you that will help to do 100% recovery of your deleted photos, videos, and audio files.

NOTE:- Before we proceed I would like to tell you that we tested all the photo recovery tools and 100% safe to download and try.

5 Best Photo Recovery Software in 2021 (Our Choice)

1. Stellar Photo Recovery (Windows & Mac)

Developed by Team Stellar who is the most trusted data care brand across the globe, Stellar Photo Recovery is a powerful tool to recover deleted images, audio, and video files from any type of storage media.

Awesome Features We Like

Recover any file formats regardless of size such as JPEG, JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, PSD, RAW, BMP etc.
Recovery from all storage devices such as HDD, USB Drives, Memory card, Encrypted drive.
Any type of Video & Audio file formats can be recovered ( We successfully did a recovery of numerous MP3, MP4, 3GP, WAV, MIDI, AMR files)
Deep Scanning option available
Check the preview of scanned files in 3 different ways – File type, Tree View and Deleted list
Supports recovery of Unicode files
Recovery from DSLR, Video cameras and Drones
Software interface is user-friendly and easy to use
Free trial available and pay only one you are satisfied
Successful image recovery in just 3 steps

2. Recoverit Photo Recovery (Windows & Mac)

Recover lost photos in various situations such as accidentally deletion, system formatted, System crashed or device failure, virus or malware attack, partition loss, system reinstallation, inaccessible hard disk, wiped hard drive using Recoverit Photo Recovery tool. This tool also supports all types of image and video formats but it’s taking too much time to scan our system as compared to the Stellar image recovery tool.

Team assures that you will get a full refund if no recovery happens.

3. Card Recovery (Windows & Mac)

Another award-winning and professional as well as reliable image recovery tool is Card Recovery which is a product of WinRecovery software that uses a smart scan technology to recover the deletion of data. As per the company 1K users everyday use card recovery tool to recover the deleted photos lost in various scenarios. During various situations we are not able to recover the data hence we recommend you to go for trial version before you purchase the license.

Using this tool you can retrieve the EXIF information of your image such as shooting time, image size, camera model.

While testing of Card Recovery we found that it performs READ only operations on our SD card which means data cannot be modified, move or deleted and whole process of recover is very smooth and easily done.

4. DiskDrill Photo Recovery Software (Windows & Mac)

DiskDrill is an easy to use method to bring back deleted photos.

Features

Using DiskDrill you can recover 500MB of photos completely free in the trial version.
Preview the scanned results before you start recovering deleted files.
Free Data Protection Tool so that your photos are 100% safe.
Powerful scanning algorithm that helps you to stop the scanning process at any time and recover the found photos.
Recovery from PC/Mac, HDD/SDD, USB Drive, SD/SF card, Camera, iPhone/Android

5. Exif Untrasher (Mac Only) – 100% free

Developed by German Engineer Carsten Bluem – Exif Untrasher is the free tool to recover deleted JPEG images on the Mac system. Yes, we restored images taken from various cameras such as Apple, Canon, Fuji, Kodak, Olympus. It may happen that you will not success in doing recovery from every device but you will get results that you are expecting from this free recovery tool.

Available in English, French, German & Italian language

Final Conclusion

If at any point of time you lost your precious photos you can easily recover them using the above photo recovery software. Although there are many ways and a lot of tools but based on our research we tested these top 5 photo recovery software for you to bring back lost photos. Stellar Photo Recovery is very fast in terms of scanning the data we successfully recovered 98% of photos hence we recommend this awesome tool for all professional photographers, entrepreneurs, videographers.

This article covers the top five completely free data recovery software for Mac, which varies in features, functions, and performance. However, they all have one thing in common: they are free.

Compare the five tools carefully, and select the one that fits your needs best.

PAGE CONTENT:

1. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free
2. Disk Drill
3. PhotoRec
4. TestDisk
5. Exif Untrasher
3-Step Tutorial of Free Mac Data Recovery

Top 5 Completely Free Data Recovery Software for Mac

When you get data loss on your Mac due to accidental deletion, partition/hard drive formatting, system crash, macOS upgrade, file system or hard drive corruption, stay calm and pick up one of the recommended data recovery software below for help.

1. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free is one of the free top and handy Mac data recovery software that enables you to recover data from the emptied trash bin, Mac notebooks, desktops, hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, digital cameras, etc. It works on internal APFS/HFS+/HFS X drives, and FAT/FAT32/exFAT/NTFS file systems used in USB flash drives and external hard drives connected to Mac.

Highlighted Features:

# 1. All-in-one data recovery software

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free is fully compatible with the latest macOS 11.0 (Big Sur), 10.15(Catalina), 10.14 (Mojave) and all the former versions. It enables all Mac users to perform a full recovery of lost valuable data in only 3 steps: Scan > Preview > Recover.

# 2. HFS+ Fusion Drive Recovery

The latest update of EaseUS Mac data recovery software has improved its support of Fusion Drive, which makes it work even better in retrieving files from Mac computers that are installed on fusion drives.

# 3. Encrypted Drive Recovery

Another great update in EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac is that it supports encrypted drive recovery by offering guidance to assist Mac users in decrypting and unlocking their drives with password.

# 4. Data Protection

Once the data protection feature is enabled, it will automatically back up the deleted files to a safe location. If you unexpectedly delete files and want to recover later, you can quickly restore the lost files from the created backup.

Pros:

Support to restore 200+ file types on Mac, including recovering lost Word/Excel/PPT documents, photos, videos, music files, emails, archived files, and more.
Quick Scan + Deep Scan technology greatly enhances recovery probability.
Real-time Preview allows you to preview found files while scanning and before proceeding with data recovery.
No quality-loss recovery brings your lost photos, videos perfectly back in its best performance.

Cons:

The completely free version is limited to a maximum of 2GB data recovery. (The outstanding Windows data recovery free version also provides 2GB free file recovery.)

2. Disk Drill

Disk Drill is a popular Mac data recovery application developed to recover lost partitions or files from Mac internal and external hard drives. Also, the Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery options in the free trial version support to monitor the file deletion activity and retain metadata so as to quickly undelete files.

Highlighted Features:

# 1. Undelete Protected Data (Not Available in Free Version)

Being similar to the Data Protection feature in EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac, Disk Drill also contains an undelete protected data feature that requires Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery features to be enabled in advance.

With these two features enabled, Mac users could quickly undelete files from a Trash Bin reference or shadow copy of each file to a user-specified folder.

# 2. Allocate Existing Files

When Finder fails to read data, Disk Utility reports the drive as unformatted, Disk Drill can scan the partition and retrieve data from Mac.

Pros:

Compatible with all the Mac OS X and macOS systems.
Recover 200+ file types.
It is packed with free and useful disk tools for all users.
An intuitive user interface to recover lost files effortlessly.

Cons:

The free version only allows a preview of data recovery.
Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery are not available in the free version.

3. PhotoRec

PhotoRec is a free, open-source program that works very well in data recovery on older operating systems like OS X, Linux, Free BSD, Net BSD, Open BSD, and Windows.

It allows users to restore most common files, like photos, audios, documents, ZIP archives, and others from internal or external devices, such as digital cameras, memory cards, USB flash drives and partitions/hard disks.

Highlighted Features:

# 1. Advanced File Carving

PhotoRec first searches for the data block or cluster size. The program will quickly load value from superblock like ext2/ext3/ext4 or volume boot record like FAT/NTFS if the file system is not corrupted. When the file system corrupted, PhotoRec will check the device at a sector level, using the first 10 found files to calculate the block or cluster size so as to locate and find more lost files.

# 2. Block or Cluster Level Recovery

This program will read the Mac device block by block, cluster by cluster, checking against different file signatures so as to recuperate available files.

Pros:

Support data recovery cross-platforms, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.
100% open-source program, not only the software but also the source code.
Nice tool to recover personal files.

Cons:

Not very user-friendly for ordinary computer users.
Technical skills required. It uses command lines to operate.

4. TestDisk

TestDisk, like PhotoRec, it's also an open-source, freeware product that allows for multiple file types recovery.

It mainly focuses on partition recovery. It enables users to find deleted or lost partitions by fixing the partition tables due to software crash, virus attack, mistaken formatting, etc.

Highlighted Features:

# 1. Partition Recovery

When a partition lost or disappeared on Mac due to corrupted partition tables, Mac users can apply TestDisk to rebuild and repair the corrupted partition table.

# 2. Rebuild Boot Sectors

When the Mac bootable drive fails to boot, it corrects problems in bootable drives that are failing to boot.

Pros:

Completely free and open.
Runs on several operating systems, including macOS and Mac OS X versions.
Recover lost partitions and rebuild the partition table.

Cons:

Use the command line to make data recovery.
Not user-friendly for regular computer users.

5. Exif Untrasher

Exif Untrasher is another completely free Mac data recovery tool that mainly restores deleted or JPEG files from digital cameras, external drive, USB stick, SD card, etc. You can easily download and install this software on your Mac running Mac OS X 10.10 and all the later versions.

Highlighted Features:

# 1. Highly Efficient in JEPG Recovery

Exif Untrasher is a tool that mainly designed to locate photos in JEPG formats on any kind of storage device like SD card, CF card, memory stick or Mac hard disk.

External storage device needs to be mounted as a volume on Mac for the utility to access and attempt a restore.

Pros:

Simple and quick to recover lost images from the memory card.
Free with no quantity limits.
It is updated by the developer regularly.

Cons:

It only works for JEGP file recovery. It doesn't support extra file formats.

3-Step Tutorial of Free Mac Data Recovery

To help more Mac users to bring their lost files are soon as possible, we are here to show you a 3-step tutorial of free Mac data recovery. If you are eager to bring your lost files back on Mac or external storage devices, apply the brief and innovative EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free for help.

Remember to connect your USB, SD card, or external hard drive to Mac computer if your lost data were saved on it.

Step 1. Select the disk location (it can be an internal HDD/SSD or a removable storage device) where you lost data and files. Click the 'Scan' button.

Step 2. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac will immediately scan your selected disk volume and display the scanning results on the left pane.

Step 3. In the scan results, select the file(s) and click the 'Recover' button to have them back.

Conclusion

On this page, you are presented with the top 5 completely free Mac data recovery software - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free, Disk Drill, PhotoRec, TestDisk, Exif Untrasher. When you are facing unexpected data loss on Mac, the programs demonstrated above can help you recover lost files effectively.

What's more, if your lost data is less than 2GB, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free is highly recommended as it provides the most user-friendly interface and most powerful data recovery function.

If you simply want to restore JEGP images, Exif Untrasher is worth to try.

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