How do I fix corrupt digital photos?

nscheiner,

I'm afraid the prognosis is not good. The thumbnail appears because it is in the thumbs.db file (as xoorox said), not because Windows is reading the image and showing the full content. My experience with corruption taking the form you describe has been that that's as good as it's going to get. Have you tried IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) as one of your other viewers?

Here's a couple of thoughts for you: First of all, try photo recovery software: take a look at BadCopy Pro (http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/) and PhotoRescue (www.datarescue.com - for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X). Each of these can deal with corrupted graphics files, and help repair the damaged files. I've had my best success with PhotoRescue, although sometimes images can be fixed in one of these and not the other.

You can also sometimes open corrupted file in applications like CorelDraw (which can sometimes import damaged JPGs. Once the file is imported into Draw it can be exported again as a new fresh JPG) or Photoshop (using RAW mode). For the latter, you need to know the size of the image in pixels. What you do in Photoshop is select File>Open As and in the dialog box choose RAW and then the file you want to open. Another dialog box will ask you to enter a size in pixels and the amount of channels (choose 3 here), leave the Header Size blank and click OK.

* For the following items, always work on COPIES, not on your originals *

You might also try opening the file and re-saving it in tif format. Save it as-is as soon as you open, then exit Photoshop and then re-open the new .tif file. You can also try rotating and saving, etc. Make sure you don't save over your original.

Last, some times the file can be opened in a text editor or a Hex editor, and the data stream altered slightly, allowing them to be opened with a graphics program (this is the process also described in xoorox's link to dpreview). However, if there is a lot of information missing from the files, it is impossible to fully recover the images. The basic procedure is something like the following:

Open a working image files from the same source (same digital camera, etc.) as your corrupted files in a hex editor, and take a look at the flow of the files -  typically they should begin with FFD8, followed by a string of other characters. Get an idea of the flow.

Then, open your corrupt file, and look through the file. You're looking for a place where there's an obvious change to the flow of the data. If you can spot it, you might be able to fix it - at least if the damage is obvious, like a erroneous character or blank line introduced into the file. Sometimes you can simply copy the header information (first few lines) over from a good image.

Not to nag or say "I told you so", but ALWAYS have a backup plan and use it - recovering one lost file, like this, can pay for it.

Hope that helps,
LHerrou