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 »
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 »
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.
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 »
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 »
Can corrupt Canon CR2 RAW photos be repaired? As expected there is no yes/no answer possible top this question. If you’re unable to open the file at all then perhaps, but definitive answer is only possible after closer examination of the file. Windows Photos will simply state: “It appears we don’t support this file format”… Read More »
Raymond.cc’s JPEG repair challenge If you have googled for software to repair corrupt JPEG photos, then there’s a good chance you have come across this article on Raymond.cc: 5 Tools to Repair Corrupted JPEG Photos and Images. Raymond, or the article author HAL9000 (utterly cool nick!) set up an artificial test to test various tools that… Read More »
Recover Canon CR2 RAW photos. Canon CR2 raw files contain unprocessed raw sensor data. Depending on the camera’s resolution they tend to be quite large and due to typical usage patterns (preview photo > dismiss/delete file > shoot new file etc.) the files become easily fragmented. Shoot video too? Then fragmentation is very likely to… 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 »