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 »
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 »
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 »
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.
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 »
Photo restoration by removing unwanted objects using inpaint software JPG_Repair Toolkit now includes a small ‘inpaint’ utility to ‘touch up’ repaired photos. JPG-Repair sometimes leaves scars when it is necessary to repair ‘image shift’. All that it requires is for the user select an unwanted object in the photo which Photo Heal will try to… Read More »
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 »
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 »