AAUG Reviews

by Ronald Schoedel, AAUG Member

Klix is billed as being able to recover photos from formatted, erased, corrupted or damaged digital media cards. Occasionally a camera media card can get corrupted, just like any other hard disk or magentic media. The prospect of losing hundreds of irreplaceable photos is not one anyone wants to face. Klix is made for the average digital camera user (as well as professionals) who needs to recover photos that may be feared lost.

I decided to put this program to the test by erasing my camera’s compact flash card several times, reformating it after each erasure, and then finding out just how good Klix really is. I will say from the start that I was incredibly impressed. If you have no time to read the rest of my review, and just want to know if this program can recover your digital photos, then the answer in my case was an astounding “yes”.

To begin with, I downloaded my photos from my camera into iPhoto. When doing an import such as this, iPhoto conveniently offers to delete the originals from your camera after downloading. I chose to do this. I watched as about 40 photos transfered from the camera into iPhoto, and then as they got “deleted”.

With the camera card mounted on my desktop, I confirmed that no photos were visible on the “drive”. Placing the card into the camera again yielded no visible photos, and the entire capacity of the card as being available. I wanted to really see what Klix could do, so I reformatted the card while in the camera. The camera dutifully warned me that this operation was irreversible, and asked if I wanted to proceed. Yes, I did.

I plugged the camera back into my iMac. I fired up Klix. It recognized my media card, and then with a simple very simple interface presented to me (fig. 1), I chose “start” to see what Klix could recover from my card. I was thinking it might be able to retrieve the 40 photos I had just deleted and formatted over. I was in for a surprise.

The scanning process is a slow one. You can set it to go, and leave it for a while. I assume this varies depending on the capacity of your card. My 256 MB Compact Flash card took about 40 minutes to scan from start to finish. As Klix discovers photos that it can recover, it populates the Image Recovery Window (fig. 2).

At the end of the scanning process, I was positively surprised at the results. Klix offered up 207 photos for recovery. I browsed this recovery window and saw that most of the recent photos were available, as well as a whole host of pictures taken over the last year! I can attest that this card had been reformatted at least six times and yet Klix recovered photos going back that far. One photo, the very most recent photo I had taken, was not recoverable. Several more were only partially recoverable. I could open these photos and see the part that was undamaged, and had I wanted to, I could crop it down to the good part and possibly have a useful photo.

After seeing which photos are available, and choosing those you want, you simply click “recover” and the photos are saved to your specified folder. It really is just that easy. ProSoft’s “JoeSoft” division really has made this program easy for regular Joes.

The Klix user manual notes that results may vary based on what your camera does when it formats a card. My Nikon, for example, apparently leaves the bulk of the data intact. Fuji and some Olympus cameras actually write over the card when formatted, so JoeSoft recommends users download the free demo, which allows you to scan a card, and to recover one photo, to see if it will work for you before you spend the $29.95 to purchase Klix.

Klix is a program that you may think you can do without until you need it. As such, it may not be something you want to buy until that time. On the other hand, you may be caught with a damaged or accidentally erased card while unable to download or buy the software. In such cases, it would be nice to have Klix presinstalled on your computer so it’s there when you need it. Sort of like a tire jack or jumper cables: you really don’t want to be caught without them on a desert road 100 miles away from the nearest service station. You want to have safety tools available so they’ll be there when the need arises.

If you take a lot of digitial photos and/or rely on your digicam, Klix is a minor investment that could save you a lot of grief. The program can be downloaded or purchased on a hybrid CD, which includes a Windows version along with the Mac version. Salvaging just one group of priceless photos will be more than worth the cost of Klix.

I have accumulated almost 11,000 digital photos over the past several years (and those are just the ones I keep). I rely on digicams for our family memories as well as for some professional purposes. I am glad to have Klix in my arsenal of useful tools on my PowerBook. I heartily recommend it to any digicam user. $30 (new lower price since review was posted!) is a small price to pay for peace of mind, and it sure is cheaper than taking a replacement cruise through the Mediterranean because you lost all of your precious vacation photos!

Klix receives a 5/5 rating. It has zero drawbacks. It is a one-trick pony, but that one trick has been perfected. Realistically speaking, there will be some photos that Klix can recover and some it can’t, so keep that in mind. But some is better than none.

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