Digital image repair

June 28, 2005 9:47 AM

Image Repair: My flashcard got corrupted. How do I repair the photos?

I used mmCard Recovery to get most of the images. Several of them show up okay in thumbnail, but they show up corrupted when I enlarge them. I found software that will fix them, but it costs $159! Does anyone know of less expensive software that will fix these images?

posted by Juicylicious to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I guess your real question is "how do I repair them without spending $160" huh?

When you say "in thumbnail" what does that mean? Putting the card back in the camera? In the camera connected to your (windows?) computer via cable? Card plugged into a USB/PCMCIA adaptor?

Most consumer camera are going to be taking JPGs which do not, to my knowledge, ever have a seperate thumbnail graphic embedded in them. So if you're seeing a thumbnail it's just the same image, rendered smaller. Which means it shouldn't look right one way and not the other, unless it's still fuct but you just can't tell at that size. Is that correct?
posted by phearlez at 11:19 AM on June 28, 2005

phearlez, I'm waiting for an answer as well, because I have a very similar problem.

I have a CF card with some dead images on it. All I get is the thumbnails on those images. It's so frustrating. Your idea about a thumbnail being the whole image rendered smaller makes a lot of sense, and usually, that is what's going on, but if you were to take a look at our cards you'd wonder what the hell was going on.
posted by redteam at 11:29 AM on June 28, 2005

You could try a photo recovery program. I know you can get one of those really cheap, but I think there may also be a free one or two out there. Let me see if I can find one...
posted by rhapsodie at 11:34 AM on June 28, 2005

If you're running XP, if you have viewed the files [as thumbnails] previously - in some settings, XP will cache the thumbnails on the HD... so after the damage when you view the files again, XP shows the thumbnails that it has already cached.

Perhaps you can rip an ISO image of the card and ignore/retry on errors? ISOBuster would be my rec.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 11:35 AM on June 28, 2005

I just happened to cruise past a link to this PC mag article a few minutes ago. Was able to find my way back to it after I read this question. Don't know if it will help, but it looks pretty promising. (And free.)
posted by bricoleur at 11:44 AM on June 28, 2005

I used a recovery program: mmCard Recovery. It recovered most of my images. Some were okay in the mmCard preview window. Some were "damaged" and others show up as gray. I saved all of the images onto my hard drive. When I view them from the hard drive in the MyPictures folder, all but the "damaged" images show up in the thumbnails, even those that were gray in the software preview screen. When I click on the previously gray images to enlarge to full size using windows picture viewer, they go back to gray. These were not previously saved on my hard drive. Clearly the uncorrupted images are there somewhere. How do I get to them? Yes, without spending $160.

I did contact mmCard and they suspect that the media is fragmented. They asked that I send a couple of the images to them. Perhaps they'll come up with a fix. I'll post the results.
posted by Juicylicious at 11:48 AM on June 28, 2005

Here you go.
posted by rhapsodie at 11:52 AM on June 28, 2005

It's possible that the data that makes up the JPG (they are jpegs, yes?) is okay but the header or EXIF information is screwy. If the thumbnail code makes assumptions that the display code doesn't it might work where the preview does not. You could try giving it a right-click and doing an open with to use Paint - perhaps it is more robust.

This app has a trial version same as mmCards - it'll show you but not work till you pay. Perhaps it's worth trying it to see the actual quality of what's in there.
posted by phearlez at 2:10 PM on June 28, 2005

I have had this app recommended to me in the past (although haven't yet needed to use it myself) and it still appears to be free.
posted by rjt at 5:24 PM on June 28, 2005