Category Archives: image repair

Unknown or invalid JPEG Marker

If you get a Unknown or invalid JPEG Marker this means one of two: The photo viewer or editor encountered a JPEG marker it isn’t familiar with. The JPEG file is corrupt. To rule out cause 1, your photo viewer editor doesn’t recognize a certain JPEG marker, update your software and if that does not help, try… 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 »

In the wild corrupted photos and their fixes

It is true that these are close to impossible to repair using PhotoShop like editors because it’s the underlying data that is corrupt. It means standard photo restoration techniques fall short as they work with the data that is available. JPEG-Repair is a tool designed to remove the corrupt data.

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 »

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 »

Software review: Stellar Repair for Photo

Stellar JPEG repair is now Stellar Repair for Photo I noticed Stellar renamed their photo repair tool from ‘Stellar Phoenix JPEG Repair’ to ‘Stellar Repair for Photo’. ‘Photo Repair’ suggests that rather than being limited to repairing JPEG, it also supports other digital photo formats. I visited their website and downloaded the new version. This… Read More »