Recovered photos are corrupt and won’t open after you tried to recover them using undelete, file recovery of photo recovery software? Here’s a few things to try. There are a huge number of JPEG recovery and undelete programs available on the web, many even for free. However, the vast majority of these can only handle… Read More »
There’s basically three things that can be wrong if a JPEG opens but is partially grey:
1. File is too small. Let’s an average JPEG shot with same camera and settings is 4 MB and the ones that are damaged are like 1 MB or 2 MB. Then probably half the data is simply missing. These files can not be repaired.
2. Normal file size. Either part of the file does not contain image data or file does contain image data but is interrupted by some invalid data.
If part of the file does not contain image data then this is sometimes easy to spot using a hex editor. All of a sudden ‘random’ binary data stops and changes to FF FF FF or 00 00 00 etc.. Repair: Impossible.
In case the data is however is there but it is interrupted repair is often possible. JPG-Repair tries to detect and will try to get rid of the invalid data, however this does not always work. Current version detects invalid JPEG markers, common damage due to bad sectors and some type of corruption I observed a few times with images shot with certain Samsung phones.
How to repair a corrupted JPEG photo may seem a simple question but the answer isn’t. Many people seem to expect to run some JPEG Repair software and that fixes it. And that’s what many of my competitors promise. If only it were that simple. Now, let’s take this one step at the time to… Read More »
RAW photos such as DNG and NEF often embed JPEG photos. In case of file corruption it may be useful to ‘recover’ these JPEGs in case repair of the corrupted RAWs is not possible. I was reading this article: “Lucky Accidents: Viewing Corrupted JPEG Photos in a New Light“. In the comment section the author… Read More »
JPG-Repair Toolkit allows you to recover data from corrupted CR2 photos (JPEG). Canon RAW photos (CR2) contain the raw, ‘undeveloped’ sensor data. JPG-Repair Toolkit can process multiple Canon RAW files (Cr2) files in batch. Commonly Canon RAW photos embed one or more JPEGs: a low resolution thumbnail, a medium resolution preview, and in many cases… Read More »
Not all corrupt JPEGs can be repaired. In fact, a large number of damaged JPEG files I receive on a daily basis can not. So I spend a fair amount of time on files that I nor anyone else can repair. About 90% of these non repairable files suffer from one of the following issues:… Read More »
Windows Photo Viewer: File appears to be damaged, corrupted or is too large The first thing you need to check is if other photo viewers can actually open the file. For example try Windows Photos or a third party photo viewer. If those fail to open the photo as well, the file may be corrupt. If… Read More »
Can corrupt Canon CR2 RAW photos be repaired? As expected there is no yes/no answer possible top this question. If you’re unable to open the file at all then perhaps, but definitive answer is only possible after closer examination of the file. Windows Photos will simply state: “It appears we don’t support this file format”… Read More »
Recover Canon CR2 RAW photos. Canon CR2 raw files contain unprocessed raw sensor data. Depending on the camera’s resolution they tend to be quite large and due to typical usage patterns (preview photo > dismiss/delete file > shoot new file etc.) the files become easily fragmented. Shoot video too? Then fragmentation is very likely to… Read More »
I recently did a MP4 video recovery from a memory card (SD). It contained combined JPEG photo and MP4 video data, shot with a Canon EOS 600 D. Previous recovery attempts done by the customer resulted in the majority of the files being corrupt. All MP4 video was unplayable. Most recovered MP4 videos were tiny… Read More »