Category Archives: image recovery

Recover deleted DCIM folder on android mobile phone (Samsung)

Original question: Help, I deleted my entire DCIM folder from mobile phone (Samsung) Micro SD Card. Can I recover my photos? A typical answer to this question in many forums and communities is, pull the SD Card from the phone and run PhotoRec. This is indeed an option, but I’m not sure if it’s the… Read More »

Unstable SD card with bad sectors data recovery – freezing, locks up, read errors, disconnects

Recovering your precious photos from a SD card can be challenging enough after accidental file deletion or formatting. Recovering data from an unstable SD Card may prove to even more difficult. Recovering data from an unstable SD Card Many file, photo and data recovery tools available focus on file recovery. Their efforts focus on discovery… Read More »

JPEG-Repair, no SOS detected

A common error message that JPEG-Repair reports is ‘no SOS detected’. I have written several posts and made videos to repair JPEG photos in case the Windows photo viewers report errors: The old Windows photo viewer: File appears to be damaged, corrupted or is too large. The new Windows Photos: It looks like we don’t… Read More »

The corrupt JPEGs that weren’t corrupt

Often I am asked to repair JPEGs that can be opened but don’t display correctly. Many of those look okay for some part, but turn into a grey area at some point. Repairing these files (or recovering them as we’ll see) isn’t always straight forward and sometimes requires some detective work. Half grey photos In… Read More »

Partial full format on SD Card, can I recover photos?

You can not recover if you let a full format complete. It depends if the full format was allowed to complete. A full format overwrites data. Overwritten data can not be recovered. So in case the format operation had the chance to complete, you can stop reading here, nothing and no one will be able… Read More »

Recover photos from Android Micro SD Card

Probably Android phones are the most common devices to take photos with nowadays often stored on a Micro SD Card. Consequentially many lost photos will be on Android devices. Photos can be on: Internal memory (Micro) SD Card Although many want you to believe it is easy to recover the lost or deleted photos and… Read More »

Undelete and photo recovery find no data on formatted SD Card

Case: SD Card is accidentally formatted in Windows (10). Some popular recovery tools are tried; Recuva from Piriform, Recoverit Photo Recovery from Wondershare and Stellar Photo Recovery. Recoverit and Stellar Photo recovery are basically nothing else than dumbed down versions of their generic data recovery tools. They fail to detect any data. In this video… Read More »

Photos on SD card are corrupt

When you discover photos on your SD card are corrupt or the memory card itself is corrupt you should: Do as little as possible (read: nothing) with the card. Do NOT run chkdsk on the card itself! Do not format the card even if it asks you to! Instead: Create a disk image of the… Read More »

How to fix and open recovered photos?

Unfortunately it is a common problem that you are unable to open recovered photos after using file recovery, undelete or photo recovery software on a SD card. In this post I will make some assumptions: Photos are on a memory card and therefor: File system is a variation of FAT  (FAT32, exFAT) File type is… Read More »

Fake memory cards

Not a week goes by where I am not confronted with loss of digital photos caused by fake memory cards. The sad news is that as these photos were never actually saved to the card they can’t be repaired nor recovered by tools like JPEG-Repair or JPEG Recovery LAB. A 32 GB card that you… Read More »