Tag Archives: corrupt jpeg

Recover RAW photos using JpegDigger

JpegDigger is a JPEG carver. As such you may not expect it to be useful to recover RAW photos. However I have been able to put it to good use in a number of cases where: RAW photos were lost or deleted Photos appear corrupt on memory card RAW photos were corrupt after recovery JpegDigger… 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 »

Recovered photos are corrupt – Won’t open

Corrupted DNG photo

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 »

Bottom half of JPEG is missing or grey or solid color

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.

Diagnostics of damaged and corrupt JPEGs

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 »