Repairing a corrupted image file

[Johnny Novgorod]

I should post this on Advice but nobody goes there.

I downloaded hundreds of pictures from this shitty digital camera I have and a couple of them are apparently corrupted. No thumbnail, can't open them on any kind of program - Paint, Photoshop, PowerPoint, etc. I've tried just about everything to retrieve the images. One of them in particular is important to me because it's a (extremely rare) picture of me with friends. I also tried a bunch of third-party software but nothing works. I know those pictures are probably gone forever but does anybody at least know anything else I can try before giving up?

 

[Aerosteam]

What file type is it? 'cause if it's a super obscure one then you're not gonna find a way to open it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

What file type is it? 'cause if it's a super obscure one then you're not gonna find a way to open it.

A JPG.
I took like 700 pictures with this camera and for no apparent reason 2 of them cannot be viewed or opened (afraid I already deleted the original files from the camera as well). Wouldn't care if it wasn't for that one picture.

 

[Aerosteam]

What file type is it? 'cause if it's a super obscure one then you're not gonna find a way to open it.

A JPG.
I took like 700 pictures with this camera and for no apparent reason 2 of them cannot be viewed or opened (afraid I already deleted the original files from the camera as well). Wouldn't care if it wasn't for that one picture.

If programs can't open it I'd upload it to imgur or something else online if it's just a jpeg as a last resort. Or maybe upload it anywhere so I can download and take a look at it, if you're comfortable with that.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

What file type is it? 'cause if it's a super obscure one then you're not gonna find a way to open it.

A JPG.
I took like 700 pictures with this camera and for no apparent reason 2 of them cannot be viewed or opened (afraid I already deleted the original files from the camera as well). Wouldn't care if it wasn't for that one picture.

If programs can't open it I'd upload it to imgur or something else online if it's just a jpeg as a last resort. Or maybe upload it anywhere so I can download and take a look at it, if you're comfortable with that.

Thanks, I'll PM you.

 

[Baffle]

Have you tried opening the image in VLC? I've always found it pretty good at opening corrupt/incomplete video. I'm not sure if you could export it as another file even then, but maybe screenshot.

 

[Squilookle]

It's a long shot, but copy the file, and rename the file extension of the copy, to bmp, or png or some other image format.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Have you tried opening the image in VLC? I've always found it pretty good at opening corrupt/incomplete video. I'm not sure if you could export it as another file even then, but maybe screenshot.

Tried VLC, Windows Media Player, Adobe Pro. Got nothing

It's a long shot, but copy the file, and rename the file extension of the copy, to bmp, or png or some other image format.

Tried renaming to BMP and PNG (anything else is too weird to consider) and opening on a number of programs, still nothing.

(Thanks anyway)

 

[Frezzato]

Tried renaming to BMP and PNG (anything else is too weird to consider) and opening on a number of programs, still nothing.

(Thanks anyway)

There's no reason to stop trying different formats though. It's not going to hurt to copy to a new location and try renaming to stuff like GIF, TIFF and RAW == because if it involves just a right-click and typing, it's worth a shot.

There are programs to help recover (ostensibly) corrupted JPEGs but who knows if that actually works.

This [https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/6045/why-do-images-get-corrupted] is an interesting read as well.

 

[Baffle]

You could try a hex editor to see if there's actually any data in the files at all. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nst7GtSo9c0 or https://www.disktuna.com/check-jpegs-data-ordering-jpeg-repair-service/

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

If your camera (or memory card) connects to Windows as a "hard drive", you can run Restoration [https://restoration.en.softonic.com/] on the drive to recover files. It's recovered quite a few files I've deleted on accident. You probably know that when you delete something, you really don't delete it but just remove the entry from the file system and the data is still there until you save something new over that data. So if you haven't used your camera since, the data is still there, though it might be corrupted data still. It's at least a different avenue to try.

 

[IceForce]

You could try "IrfanView". Apparently it boasts being able to open practically every image format under the sun (and then some). It can even open some really obscure videogame texture files as well as a bunch of other stuff.

As someone mentioned above though, you should check if the image you're trying to open even has any data in it at all. Because it doesn't matter how many programs you try or how many times you re-name it, nothing is going to work if it's a 0-byte file with nothing inside it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

So according to Aero the extension is capitalized (don't know why), which makes things weird, but I'll keep trying stuff.

If your camera (or memory card) connects to Windows as a "hard drive", you can run Restoration [https://restoration.en.softonic.com/] on the drive to recover files. It's recovered quite a few files I've deleted on accident. You probably know that when you delete something, you really don't delete it but just remove the entry from the file system and the data is still there until you save something new over that data. So if you haven't used your camera since, the data is still there, though it might be corrupted data still. It's at least a different avenue to try.

I guess I could try that. Technically I already deleted the first batch of pictures from the camera but maybe it works.

You could try "IrfanView". Apparently it boasts being able to open practically every image format under the sun (and then some). It can even open some really obscure videogame texture files as well as a bunch of other stuff.

As someone mentioned above though, you should check if the image you're trying to open even has any data in it at all. Because it doesn't matter how many programs you try or how many times you re-name it, nothing is going to work if it's a 0-byte file with nothing inside it.

Size's 2,76 MB (2.897.920 bytes), so there's something there, regardless of whether I can recover it or not.
I'll try IrfanView.