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.
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 »
Recently I was offered a batch of corrupt JPEGs for repair that were recovered from a SD card using Piriform’s Recuva. The recovered files were not recognized by any image viewer as valid JPG files. This does not appear to be an uncommon thing. Recuva is a popular and the go-to file recovery tool for… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
JPEG visual corruption In general there are two kinds of symptoms that indicate a JPEG image is corrupted: Photo can not be viewed at all; Windows Explorer fails to display thumbnails JPEG can be opened but there is visual corruption in one form or the other In case 1 it is safe to assume at… Read More »
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 »
In this short blog post I show an example repair of a heavily corrupted and distorted JPEG photo. End result is far from a beautiful picture, but sometimes something is better than nothing. Specially if it is one of the few photos of a loved one that is no longer with us. This is what… Read More »
Sometimes JPEG photos simply can not be repaired because the majority of the data inside a file simply is not JPEG data. I had one of those cases earlier this week. Good thing was that a reasonably sized thumbnail could be extracted. The case: a Samsung Galaxy 5 Photos were taken using a Samsung Galaxy… Read More »