Photo recovery is a process whereby a user attempts to recover data from a formatted disk or a corrupted database. The process can be done manually and is usually done using specialized tools. It is most commonly used to recover photos and other data from digital cameras and mobile phones. It is also used to recover data from failed disk backups, photos from a photo lab, and data from corrupted databases.

A photo recovery tool consists of several components. The first component is a file recovery algorithm. It is used to determine the location of a specific file type on the disk. Once the location is determined, the second component is a file recovery utility. It is used to actually recover the files. The user must provide the location where the files were lost. 

Photo recovery is a process that can be done manually.