Review: Picture Rescue For Lost Images
Lost images can be found (March 29th, 2005)
The Good
- Easy to use, reads corrupt memory cards, supports most image formats, good performance.
The Bad
- Costs $20-$30 more than the competition, may not recover all images possible on a media card, may have some camera compatibility issues.
If you own a digital camera, then a utility like Prosoft Engineering’s Picture Rescue should be in your digital toolbox. It never fails that at the worst possible moment, digital photos are unintentionally deleted, or the camera’s digital media card becomes unreadable before you can download any images. Rather than spend hours in agony or trying to recreate the shots, Picture Rescue can recover lost images in a matter of minutes, in most cases.
Using Picture Rescue couldn’t be easier. Installation is a simple drag-and-drop from the CD-ROM into your Applications folder. Connect a camera or memory card reader, insert a card, and launch Picture Rescue. Once Picture Rescue recognizes the camera or card, it displays information in its austere dialog box. The Start button begins the recovery process in which Picture Rescue scans the media card, pieces together the image data, and displays thumbnails of the found images in an Image Recovery Window. Next, select the images you want restored, click the recover button, and choose where to save the recovered images, and you’re done. The process is relatively quick, although your mileage may vary depending on the capacity of the media card, the speed of your Mac, and the media card reader.
Picture Rescue works, but with some limitations. Several images were recovered from a corrupt Compact Flash card, plus all the deleted test images from a digital camera. Prosoft’s claim that Picture Rescue can recover images from formatted media cards didn’t fare so well.It couldn’t recover anything from a Toshiba digital camera formatted SmartMedia card. I also think Picture Rescue’s recovery algorithm is not as strong as the one in DataRescue’s PhotoRescue utility, which recovered five more images from the corrupt Compact Flash card than Picture Rescue. While Picture Rescue supports most common digital still camera image and video file formats, it was also unable to recover deleted AVI video files taken with my Toshiba camera.
Overall, Picture Rescue is a solid utility that improves with each revision. Picture Rescue requires Mac OS X 10.2 or higher, 128 MB RAM, and hard drive space equal to twice the capacity of your media card.
Edited by Ilene Hoffman, Reviews Editor
