File and photo recovery can be easy or difficult depending on the type of recovery you need to do. For example, recovering photos from a broken PC is quite simple, provided that the damaged piece is not the hard disk.
Even recovering deleted photos, as well as restoring photos from a formatted and zeroed USB disk or pen, can be simple, but not always possible depending on the configuration of the operating system and the elapsed time and the type of deletion or formatting.
Very difficult, then, is the recovery of photos or files that have been hidden and encrypted by a virus, that type of Ransomware virus capable of taking files hostage and asking for ransom.
Whether it's a virus, a hardware failure or simply our mistake, here we see the strategies to be adopted, the programs that can be used to recover deleted or lost photos .
READ ALSO: Back up all your PC and mobile photos with Google Photos
Photo recovery from broken PC
To begin with, if it is a broken PC that you cannot reboot, don't worry, you can still save everything to transfer the photos to an external disk and then bring them to another PC.
We have seen, therefore, how to recover files from a broken PC and damaged disk, even by inserting the hard disk into another computer or even connecting it to another PC using an external USB cable.
Obviously this works if the disk is not completely broken, that is if it still rotates.
If, however, the disc no longer turns, the only solution is to go to a technician who can try to repair his mechanics or his energy supply.
Recover Deleted Photos from Windows PC or Mac
In case you want to recover the photos deleted by mistake, first of all you can check if they are still present in the trash.
If they were, just select everything and then press the right button to restore them to their original position.
If they are not in the recycle bin, it may be that the deleted photos can be recovered from the automatic backup created by the operating system.
Precisely, it is possible to recover files and photos from Windows if the File History function is active or, on Mac, using the Time Machine function.
If, on the other hand, the photos had been precisely deleted, even from formatted USB disks and pens, there are some free programs that you can try to restore photos and recover them .
1) Recuva, for Windows PC, is a very simple program to use, with a wizard that will recover deleted files and photos by making a complete scan of the disk.
The options allow you to recover only photos or other types of files, to target the search only on one drive and to make a deeper and more accurate scan.
Once done, the results tell us the condition of each recovered file and the possibility of doing a deeper scan to improve it.
2) DMDE Free Edition, for Windows and Linux, is perhaps the best free tool mentioned in this article, because it is capable of recovering data from any type of drive, be it an external disk or a disk specially formatted.
The free version has a limit in the recovery modes, but not in the amount of data that can be restored.
3) PhotoRec, for Windows, Linux and Mac, is a very popular tool, like Recuva, for recovering photos and files from any disk or USB drive or memory card or even CD and DVD.
The program also accompanies another software called TestDisk, which allows you to recover partitions and correct disk errors.
The main complication is the user interface, non-existent, made at the command line and, at first glance, intimidating.
In reality, you just have to follow the instructions that guide you to the recovery procedure and you can't really go wrong even by pressing at random.
4) MiniTool Partition Recovery Free is a program used to recover an entire missing partition, if it has been damaged or deleted by mistake.
5) EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard is a very reliable, very powerful program, usable also for free (with the limit of 1 GB of files) to recover photos and other types of files even from formatted disks.
6) RePicvid Free Photo Recovery is a more recent program for Windows and Mac PCs that after a scan is able to recover and bring back deleted or lost photos, with an efficiency greater than that of Recuva.
In addition to these free programs, we also report other software specialized in recovering photos and images from a computer, which you can try for free, but which must then be purchased in order to take advantage of all the power and recovery functions without limitations.
- Easy Digital Photo Recovery (Windows only)
- Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery (Windows and Mac)
- Odboso PhotoRetrieval (Windows)
- Remo Recover media (Windows and Mac).
In another article we saw the apps to recover photos from iPhone and Android smartphones .
In the case of malware or viruses that has encrypted and hidden the photos, we have seen how to recover files blocked by ransomware without paying the ransom .
