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 »
With Network Attached Storage or NAS for short becoming more popular, the demand for quality DIY solutions for NAS data recovery software increases. I will introduce two of those, and will expand the article in the future with other solutions I come across. Common steps to recover data from a NAS Steps: Disassemble the NAS and… 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 »
The error ‘The volume does not contain a recognized file system’ CHKDSK error message, is what I’d call a catch-all error message. It is very generic and it can have multiple causes, but in essence Windows and chkdsk have trouble determining the file system on a volume whether this is on a hard disk or… Read More »
One of the common issues I deal with or get questions about is that recovered photos are corrupt after using file recovery or undelete software. To understand how or why this is happening we first need to address how undelete and photo recovery software works. TL;DR: If recovered photos are corrupt you have two options:… Read More »
Windows Photos: “It looks like we don’t support this file format.” The first thing you need to check is if other photo viewers can actually open the file. For example try the ‘old’ Windows Photo Viewer or a third party photo viewer. If those fail to open the photo as well, the file is probably… 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 RAF photos (JPEG). Fujifilm RAW photos (RAF) contain the raw, ‘undeveloped’ sensor data. JPG-Repair Toolkit can process multiple RAW files (RAF) files in batch. Commonly RAW photos embed one or more JPEGs: a low resolution thumbnail, a medium resolution preview, and in many cases a full… Read More »