PhotoNoseLogo200.gifToday Sime reviews PhotoNose – a photo recovery software.

Download… Run… Next, Next, Next, Next… Install… Finish…

You’re done, that’s all it takes to install Photo Nose Pro by Acute tools. I was sent this little (1.78mb) piece of photo recovery software by the guys at Acute Tools to try out, and what a great little piece of software it is. I use recovery software on a weekly basis in my “day job” mainly for recovering failed drives and that sort of thing. I’ve used about five different suites of recovery software in the course of my IT life and have not had much trouble with any of them as was the case with Photonose Pro… The install process took a whole forty seconds, then, with a double click I was well on my way to recovery.

I shot a 4gb card of photos last night in cr2 format (That’s Canons RAW file format) and, as ever was quite keen to get the photos onto my laptop for developing in Adobe Lightroom. I popped the little door open and slipped the card out and, to my dismay, noticed as the card was popping out that the file write was probably still part way through. Now, I know that the camera powers down when you open the little door, but, I managed to get it to power down mid way through a file write and corrupted the card! Brilliant… Well, not all bad, the shoot was just part of my threesixtyfive so it wasn’t crucial, but, it was an ideal time to put Photonose through its paces!

I plugged the generic Belkin card reader into my Windows XP computer and went about installing the software as described above… click click click and you’re done.

Running the software is a simple double click and you’re confronted with a window that welcomes you and tells you to make sure your camera or digital media is connected to the computer. A click of the next button and the software scans for devices and returns a list of possible devices from your computer, in my case this is a list of fifteen different drives. I selected the “EOS_DIGITAL” in drive H: and left the “Select file types” drop down menu set to “All supported media types” which is the default setting, and click next without changing any of the advanced settings, the advanced settings only give you an option not to perform a quick scan or not. Leaving the settings on default doesn’t seem to take any more time than specifically setting the software to search only for the type of files that you’re looking for, which in my case would have been .cr2. You have a choice of all the various raw formats as displayed down below, as well as various audio and video formats. Moving on, with the scan completed (My 4gb SanDisk Extreme 3 cf card took about 10 minutes to scan) Photonose reports that it has found five hundred and forty five files…

photo-nose-1.jpgOK! We’re in business, so to speak…

After the scan, it’s very simple to recover the found files; you select the drive location that you’d like to restore them to and in about ten minutes (in my case with a 4 GB SanDisk Extreme 3) you have a folder of files ready to use. I imported all the files into Adobe Lightroom to confirm that they were all intact … 100% success!

With a very easy to use interface and such quick install times and relatively small file size, I’d say that Photonose should be part of your Digital Photo processing suite, you never know when you’ll need it!

The Pro version of the software will set you back $49.95 with the regular version costing just $29.95 with a link HERE showing the difference between the two products.

Verdict?

Install 9/10 … A very easy install makes it easy for anyone scared of computers to use.

Ease of use 10/10 … A few very obvious clicks and you have your photos back!

Functionality 8/10 … Recovery of all the major file formats from most types of media.

Here’s your list of the various file formats and devices from which Photonose will recover.

photo-nose.jpg

Here’s a direct link to the manufacturers website where you can download a trial of the software

Try it out, worked very well for me…

Sime

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