Exif Untrasher Review & Tutorial 2016: Recover Photos from Digital Media on Mac for Free

Note: this post was last updated on February 22, 2016. A few corrections related to Exif Untrasher was added to the content.

If you are looking for a completely free Mac photo recovery software to recover those deleted or formatted pictures from your digital camera, Exif Untrasher is the one

Yes, it's a freeware which can help retrieve images deleted or lost from external devices (digital camera, USB flash drive, memory SD card etc.) right on your Mac machine. 

You don't have to pay for commercial apps to do that. See instructions and reviews for Exif Untrasher below

Please note: Exif Untrasher works under Mac OS X only, there is no Exif Untrasher for Windows. If you are using a PC, try Recuva or Pandora Recovery (free without any limitations).


Part 1: Basic Information about Exif Untrasher

It is a JPG photo recovery tool that will locate images on your digital camera’s memory card (CF card, SD card, memory stick or anything else) and save them to your Mac. It won’t succeed in every case, but a lot of people got pretty good results using it. It is especially useful for recovering pictures that you have taken with your digital camera but trashed accidentally.


  • Download Version: 1.5 (10/07/2014) 
  • Download Links: from the official site
  • Size: 186 KB 
  • Platform: Mac OS X 10.6 or higher (Intel), including latest OS X El Capitan.
  • Price: FREE 
  • Commercial Use: Allowed, you can make donations. 
  • Supported Languages on Interface: English, German, French and Italian

Part 2: How to use Exif Untrasher: a step by step tutorial

Though Exif Untrasher claims that it is a program to recover JPG photos from digital camera on Mac, the fact is it not only supports digital camera (sd card, memory stick etc) but also USB flash drive (device I used to test). So I would like to describe the app as a free Macintosh JPG photo recovery software for removable media. 

To start with, I don't have a digital camera or sd memory card at hand. So I replaced the test device with my handy 2 GB USB flash drive. I put a batch of photos (contaning formats JPG, PNG, GIF,TIF etc) with quantity of about 120 (note: most of them are JPEG format) to my USB drive. And hit Delete option to get them erased (which was done under my HP laptop with Windows operation system). Then I plugged the thumb drive in my Mac machine with Exif Untrasher installed already. Now come to the step by step test or tutorial.

Step 1: Open the software. Choose the Source Volume which you want to recover photos from. As you can see in the picture below. The internal Macintosh HD has been disabled to select (Exif Untrasher is unable to recover photos from internal Macintosh HD). So I selected my USB drive (shown as JOHN’S USB). Then chose the Destination path which used to store the recovered photos. After that pressed OK.

Step 2: The Program will pop out a new windows indicating it needs to create a disk image of my USB drive in order to retrieve any images in it. It’s actually doing a clone of my USB drive. Simply click “OK” as it won’t do anything bad to the recovery. 

Step 3: Just wait a moment until the disk image is created. I waited about 30 seconds before it came to the scanning process. 
Step 4: The scanning process takes time depending on the storage volume of your external drive. It took me about 5 minutes for my 2 GB USB flash and found 95 photos. All are JPG format, no other PNG, GIF or TIF ones found as you can see clearly from below. 

Part 3: Review of Exif Untrasher

Pros:
  • Can recover photos deleted or formatted from external device son Mac OS X for Free. You don’t have to pay for any commercial programs as you may know 99% mac photo recovery software on the market are not free (usually not cheap at all). 
  • It’s a freeware with GUI (Graphic User Interface) which makes photo recovery more simple. From this sense, it’s far more better than the other free mac data recovery freeware called PhotoRec (command line tool). 
  • Before you are about to perform the scanning, the program will do a disk image (something like make a backup) just in case

Cons:

  • Cannot recover photos with formats such as PNG, GIF, TIFF etc or other media files (videos, music etc.) 
  • Unable to recover data from internal Macintosh HD. 
  • The program will recover the found files directly without asking you which need to recover, or which you don’t have to. You have no choice to select. 

These are the pros and cons with Exif Untrasher. But, it works as it says and remember it's totally free. If Exif Untrasher won't help, try some other Mac data recovery programs. This review from anysoftwaretools in 2016 seems great. If that still doesn't work out, your last resort would be send your device for data recovery service, but I have to warn you the recovery chance is not 100% guaranteed.

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