How to Repair Corrupt Photo / Image Files on SD Card?

wei13 on 23/07/2020 - 21:40

Hello gurus

I have some corrupt photo files on an SD card which I used to take family photos. The photos either don't load, do not load properly or show up severely distorted.

Some of the photos may still appear as thumbnails in file explorer, but when I try to open the actual photo, it will show up distorted or be just an image of one colour (ie green all over).

Wondering if any chance / method of recovering the photos… has my child's first birthday on it :(

Using windows 10. Took photos with a old Canon SX700. It's a Lexar SD card I had bought from JB.

Many thanks

Computing

Comments

  • WreckTangle on 23/07/2020 - 22:01
    +3

    Do the images show up ok on the camera’s little screen?

    • wei13 on 23/07/2020 - 22:18

      Most of them do. A few don't and appear on the camera as a blank picture with a big question mark in the middle.
      However, the ones that do still show up okay on the camera don't load on the computer.

      thanks.

  • godofpizza on 23/07/2020 - 22:24

    use sandisk rescuepro, it use to come free with their memory cards..

    • digitalaxon on 24/07/2020 - 00:00
      +4

      ^ this

      I would also suggest if you want to be clinical about recovery:

      1 Do not write anything to the sd card, doing so may cause further damage if the file system is corrupted and overwrite images/data
      2 Use something like https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ to create a raw dump of the blocks/sectors of your sd card to your hard drive. Flash has something called read disturb and sometimes data can be altered just by reading. While the card is readable make a copy of it as quickly as possible in case it's deteriorating
      3 When restoring images using photorec, place the recovered photos on a different drive ( not the same one ) - for reason #1
      4 Use a quality sd card reader - I've seen some shockers that resulted in corrupted JPEG's when reading
      5 While the horse has bolted, look at using something like google photos which you can install to backup images on removable storage when its inserted - also on your phone - as you take photos when you have wifi it uploads them to the cloud.

      I've had friends who have lost 1000's of photos and the pain could have been avoided if they had spent a few minutes setting up google photos on their devices.

      Hopefully, photorec recovers most of your photos

      • bazingaa on 24/07/2020 - 01:59
        +1

        also before trying anything, physically lock "read only" tab in the SD card to avoid accidental overwrite.

        Once, I had a corrupted partition table (lost partition) on a SD card on DSLR and was able to recover all using "TestDisk" software. But I think OP's case is different as it seems that the data on SD card has corrupted.

        I had a Fuji S1800, which used to write distorted/corrupted images to the SD card while taking photos if the camera is too hot. May be this is also a similar case as Op can't see some files even in the camera itself.

    • wei13 on 24/07/2020 - 09:04

      Thanks very much wasdw, digitalaxon, bazingaa for the information.
      I'll be giving it a try today and hopefully have some luck!

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