PixRecovery 1.0

Posted 06/06/2007 at 12:41pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

0

Comments

Print

You should have known it was a bad static-electricity day when balloons stuck to your clothes and your socks clung together as if they were made of Velcro. But you decided to pull the memory card out of your digital camera anyway, didn’t you?

The end result is 4GB of scrambled JPEG images instead of proof that the Loch Ness monster exists. Normally you’re screwed, as few “recovery” utilities actually recover corrupted JPEG files, but PixRecovery 1.0 could save your bacon. Rather than just recover files, PixRecovery also treats mangled files.

We tested PixRecovery 1.0 by first using QueTek’s excellent File Scavenger to recover all the files from a failing 4GB CF card. About half the images could not be opened in any photo viewer or with utilities designed to read damaged JPEG headers. These photos were munched, and a good portion of them were overwritten.

Using PixRecovery, we were able to open the majority of them. Recovered files are outputted as BMP files, and in most cases, they were full resolution; however, chunks were missing where the files had obviously been overwritten. Still, PixRecovery’s ability to recover images is pretty impressive.

Not impressive is the batch mode—it just doesn’t work. The GUI itself doesn’t feature a batch mode, but there is a command line mode that’s supposed to work with batches. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to recognize wildcards, so you’ll be working with images one by one.

And that’s the sad thing. While we had some success with the program, it feels threadbare. You drag a photo into the program, it tries to recover and treat the file, and that’s it. You can’t specify if you want to save your photo as a JPEG, and you can’t preview it; you just process it and that’s it. End of story.

The app also has a rather steep price considering the interface
provided (although you can test your corrupt file using the demo version). But if you’re desperate to get that once-in-a-lifetime picture of Nessie back, $150 is a small price to pay.

Snoop Dogg

The Pix Recovery 1.0 saves our JPEGS from permanent destroyal!

Vanilla Ice

The bland interface makes us wonder what our $150 was really spent on.

8