Restart markers make the difference This YouTube channel by my friend and colleague Nguyễn Vũ Hà has many great examples of JPEG-Repair being used to repair STOP/DJVU ransomware affected files. This video in particular is a great showcase on how JPEG restart markers prevent corruption propagating through the JPEG image stream. As you can see… Read More »
There are various examples on this website of repairs of half grey or truncated JPEG images. In those cases all image data is actually present, but due to an error or corruption only a part of it is visible. If data is simply missing because for example the file is partially overwritten or cut-off, repair… Read More »
This article shows repair of JPEGs that fell victim of ransomware. This particular ransomware only encrypts part of the file. Due to this the JPEG header and some 150 KB of JPEG data are lost. Using a reference file and weeding encrypted data we can repair the photo.
If you get a Unknown or invalid JPEG Marker this means one of two: The photo viewer or editor encountered a JPEG marker it isn’t familiar with. The JPEG file is corrupt. To rule out cause 1, your photo viewer editor doesn’t recognize a certain JPEG marker, update your software and if that does not help, try… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »