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 »
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 »
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.
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 »
Something I have been doing lately is looking into repair of damaged and corrupt JPEG photos. I have been offering a JPEG repair service for a while now. Learning from that experience I have created a utility called JPEG Repair Toolkit that addresses most common issues with corrupt and damaged JPEG files. Basically there are… Read More »
Comparison between various tools for photo recovery The case of the corrupt JPEG files Sometimes it turns out photos can not be repaired after recovery. Best thing to do then is to use better photo recovery software and recover the files again. Files were originally recovered using Easeus Data Recovery. Case: Contacted via Facebook Chat,… Read More »
There are many tools available to recover lost or deleted digital photos from memory cards. Most of them are unable to recover non contiguous or fragmented files. As a result fragmented files recovered by such tools will be corrupt. In such cases JPEG Recovery LAB can help you recover fragmented files. However, recovered files may… Read More »
The other week I received a SD memory card on which chkdsk was automatically run. Chkdsk turned all JPEGs into .CHK files. When Chkdsk removes certain files from the file system, it saves the content of the clusters that belong to the file in .CHK files. They are typically written to a folder called ‘FOUND.000’. As… Read More »