Just came back from a vacation with a ton of photos. When I tried to upload the photos from the Kingston memory card to a computer. It turns out the card was corrupted, so I formatted it…and lost all my pictures!! I tried Kingston MediaRecover on my computer, but it didn’t work and it seems like a dated/legacy software. Wondering what’s the best alternative to try?
First things first — Stop taking more photos and do not use your Kingston memory card!
This is important because your deleted pictures can only be recovered provided that the data contained in the files are intact — meaning not overwritten yet.
If you continue using your camera or the Kingston memory card, chances are you’re going to overwrite the data, making recovery hard if not impossible.
Kingston MediaRECOVER Review
MediaRECOVER is a digital image recovery tool provided by Kingston, but it’s been discontinued for a long time. I tested it on my MacBook (with macOS Sierra), it didn’t work properly either.
Oddly enough, the official website of this recovery program is now inaccessible (you can’t download or purchase the software).
Best Alternatives to Kingston MediaRECOVER
It’s hard to say which one is best without industry benchmarking. Data recovery is complicated and it involves a lot of technical things, no industry standards can be found to evaluate the quality of the programs available in the market.
We recommend Stellar Photo Recovery — a program specifically designed for retrieving deleted or lost pictures from flashcards and other storage media.
It’s more than just a photo recovery tool, but a media recovery software that supports the recovery of video and audio files. And it has a Mac version as well as a Windows version.
This program offers a free trial that you can use to scan your Kingston card for files that are recoverable, then it’s up to you to decide whether to pay for a license to activate the Recover function.
In case you need it, here’s a quick step-by-step guide:
- Connect your Kingston card to the computer.
- Get Stellar Photo Recovery and install the program on your computer.
- Open the software and follow the instructions shown on the interface to start a scan. In a few minutes, you’ll be able to see a list of photos found.
- Now preview those pictures to see if your lost ones are there. Select them, click Recover and save to a different location.
Be aware that it’s not 100% guaranteed that you’ll retrieve all lost photos, especially if you’ve continued using the card or have saved new data to it.
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