The bottom 2 will often show some of the image but data below the corruption will be garbled or incorrect. The first 3 images will not usually open in an image viewer/editor and will produce the type of error shown in the top screenshot. Image 5: 1KB filled with 0’s in the middle. Image 4: 32 bytes zeroed in the middle of the image Image 1: First 8 bytes of image filled with 0’s

To mimic a real corrupt image, we’ve taken a JPEG file and zeroed out various parts of it to emulate common issues: To see just how effective these programs are, we’ve run a simple test on 5 well known photo repair applications (4 paid and 1 free) to see what they can and can’t repair. Software developers know how valuable these memories can be to many of us which is why they believe people might be willing to pay big bucks if the photos can be rescued. There is however, a lot of software around that claims to be able to restore your corrupted photos for a fee. In terms of computer software, there’s virtually nothing around that can repair these image problems for free. The second half of the image appears to be there, at least in part. The image above has issues and the middle of the file has corrupted data. In that case, you might see some or all of the image displayed but there are problems with it. Of course, digital photos can be megabytes in size so it might not be the start of the file that has the problem. This type of error will be displayed if the photo cannot be identified as a JPEG image and usually means the beginning part of the image is corrupted, the part which tells other software what type of file it is. Some of the photos you get back might display perfectly and others might give you the message that the picture is damaged or corrupted in a picture viewer such as Windows Photo Viewer.

This usually happens if the file has not been 100% correctly recovered and perhaps some data has previously been overwritten or that specific area of the card/drive has bad sectors and is corrupt. However, there could be a chance that a recovered photo might be not viewable after recovering. In most common situations, images and other types of files can be recovered or undeleted if the data hasn’t been completely overwritten. We have previously written articles about recovering deleted digital photos from memory cards and flash drives and also recovering files in general with data recovery software.

Corrupted jpeg file repair online