Trying to Salvage Damaged JPEG Photos

Hi Everyone

This is my first post, and to be honest its urgent and important to me, so any help would be greatly appriciated. I took photos of my 1 month old daughter and my 2 year old daughter at the safari park and they are gorgeous photo's. My problem is i formatted my computer 2days ago and reinstalled vista. No my photos will not work with any program i tried these programs and get this message for each:

IrfanView: Can't read file header!, Unknown file or format or file not found.

Paint: Paint cannot read this file. This is not a valid bitmap, or its format is not currently supported.

Image Viewer: Couldn't display ******.JPG because a suitable graphics importer could not be found.

Please please please. My daughters birth pictures are doing the same thing. Can anyone help

See if this helps.
http://www.geocities.com/one_human/adva ... spaint_fix

Damn. It dont work. Thanks tho atno. Im really stuck, me thinks i just gota face losing my pics

bubs try downloading one of those free for 30 days file editors and see if there's anything in the file.

as a matter of interest, how big are the files? (as in memory size, 100kb's for example)

@SB the files seem to be between 1.60 - 279mb

279 MB

Holy cow! That's a big JPG. That doesn't even sound like JPG. It sounds more like a TIFF or RAW file. Are you absolutely sure these are JPGs? Were you using your camera's software to view the images before the format?

The other possiblity that occurs to me is that they are, in fact, JPGs but use a funky color space.

They are most likely a tiff at that size. And both Irfanview and Paint need a filter to display them I think.

I was doing a little reading. Do you have Microsoft Office and if so have you reinstalled it yet? I saw indications where Office installation will add the necessary filters to Paint.

Did you get my PM bubs? I left you my email address for you to email me one to take a look at it.

I want to know where these images were during the format.

I'm confused about whether they were salvaged from the formatted HDD after the format, or if they were stored on a USB/external/etc drive or CD and just don't work now with the fresh system.

If the answer is the later you probably have no reason to worry, it will just be a matter of finding the right viewers again.
If you haven't tried them on another computer yet, sending ATNO one is probably a good idea.

Hi all. Thanks for the responses. Yes i have a 13 megapixel camera. No i was using normal paint and windows photo gallery

bubs, you forgot to attach the picture in your email.

Oh what a tithead i am. Sorry there go, another one on the way

Bubs, I've been told you can replace the header if it's corrupted with a hex editor. You just copy and paste a good header from a similar jpeg. At lesast you will get it open if it's just a bad header.Haven't tried it but apparently it works.

Sorry it took so long to reply but was busy. I got the email and the jpg, and it is a jpg (slightly over 3MB), but it's corrupted. No matter what image viewer I try to open it in including Photoshop and even Quicktime Image Viewer, gives the same or similar error messages as in your initial post. Changing file extension types doesn't help either.

The Photoshop error is probably the most accurate:
"Could not complete your request because an unknown or invalid JPEG marker type is found."

At the moment I don't have the time to look up what that means. But the problem is definitely with the files and not the programs opening them.

I would refer to Joebert's questions and start analyzing things this way.




//edit Gray539 may be on target with his suggestion on restoring it but I don't quite know how to do that.

Thanks for your help Atno.
@Gray539. Im not sure how to do that sort of thing. Basically i have an external HD and a cd with the pics on. I believe that the photos have been corrupted by my external HD. But my CD wont work either. Sadly by the sounds of it, I have lost them. Thanks tho all.