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A. Ocannaille
Asked: 2020-04-26 06:09:52 +0800 CST

How to repair corrupted JPEG files that still have their thumbnails?

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I've got a bunch of photos that were on an SD card. Most of them are corrupted now and I cannot open them in any program (Gwenview, GIMP, same on Windows...). But every file browser can still correctly show most of their thumbnails. For instance, here is Gwenview with a photo selected that have a correct thumbnail:

Gwenview with a photo selected that have a correct thumbnail

I'm aware that the SD card is probably dying, so I already made an image of the SD card, with dd, on which I can work.

So far, my searches led me to PhotoRec, which does not work in my case: it recovered four useless photos and about two thirds of my ~400 images still have their thumbnail. I still hope to get most of those back.

What can I do? Any help is appreciated :)

PS: I'm on Kubuntu 20.04, I'm able to be root and I'm not afraid of the command line (but a graphical tool is still handy :D).

data-recovery thumbnails jpeg data-corruption

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use ExifTool to recover from the thumbnails. You will only get a low resolution image by doing this but it may be all you can recover if the files are that badly corrupt.

    You can install it by putting sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl in a terminal window. Then put the following:

    exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage -w $HOME/recovered/%f_thumb.%e -ext JPG <input directory>

    where <input directory> is the path to the corrupt photos.

    The above command will attempt to extract the thumbnails from the JPEG photos that have a readable thumbnail to a directory called recovered in your user home directory.

    There's also many recovery tools (mostly paid) that can be found by searching online that attempt to repair the whole image but the vast majority don't really work. One of the few that may work is JPEG Repair Shop (free) but it's manual so can take a long time if you have lots of corrupt photos. It's also only available for Windows.

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