FIGURE A


PhotoRecovery found a whole bunch of photos on my formatted card. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As you can see, PhotoRecovery found a whole bunch of photos on my formatted card. As it recovered the image, it wrote a copy of that file to my My Pictures folder, in a subfolder it called "recovered." Before running this program, make sure you've got enough hard-drive space to store a recovered mirror of the data you're looking for.

Once the program completed, it displayed the dialog shown in Figure B, indicating that it found and recovered 60 images.

FIGURE B


60 images were recovered. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Overall, the program seemed to do the job quite nicely. In fact, a quick look in the "recovered" folder showed the pictures were successfully moved to my hard drive, as shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


There they are! Roll over picture for a larger image.

The only thing weird about the program was on the About screen, shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D


What, exactly, are we upgrading? Roll over picture for a larger image.

If you look in the lower, right corner, you'll notice an Upgrade Now button. That button takes you to the LC Technology Web site (not the JASC site), where you're given the opportunity to order the product you're using. What's weird is that, as far as I can tell, the product included in the JASC Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe Edition bundle is a complete, unrestricted product. So there doesn't appear to be a need to "Upgrade Now."

Up until I sat down to write this article, I haven't really been sure how to approach reviewing these product suites. But now, I think I have an approach that could be very interesting. Rather than review the entire suite, we'll look for the buried gold, like PhotoRecovery, included within the suite. After all, if you bought PhotoRecovery directly from LC International, it'd cost you $39.95. But if you bought Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe Edition from JASC, it's only $45, and you get a whole photo album and a bunch of other treats for the extra $6!

We give PhotoRecovery a 3 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 3 of 5

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.