Help with "invalid photos"

[fadingaway1986]

I have just gotten back from NZ, and have some sad news with my NZ photos, I hope you guys can help me (I copied this from my NZ thread)

I got home, and we looked through my photos - now, 75 of them say they are corrupted!

When I load them into my computer, The files come up, and the filesizes etc, but when I click the file, it says "no preview available", so I tried opening in PaintShop Pro - and it says "This is not a valid JPEG-JFIF file".

any ideas what I can do?

The photos were burnt onto a cd by a photo lab in TeAnau, I clicked through them at the time (they ask you to check) - and they all seemed to work fine... But now I can't run them! And I tried on the DVD player first, and then on my dvd, and then on the computer..

I have since formatted the memory card & taken more photos on it... Would I still be able to recover them?

I don't think there are any extremely important photos on there - but all the same - they are my photos!

Thanks for any help you may be able to give.

- Alecia.

 

[SLOShooter]

What file type are the stored as? Perhaps your software just can't read it.

 

[Meysha]

I'm guessing there are other photos on the CD that you can see? If none of them work, try and find out what sort of file they are, ie the file extension. Then find a program that opens that type of file.

If it's only part of the CD that doesn't display properly - that's really weird. Maybe try and recover the data somehow. I just googled "cd recover" and came up with this program which might do the job. http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/cdrecover.asp

Eventhough you've formatted your card, you should still be able to get the data out unless you've written over it. So you said you've taken some photos since so some data is going to have been lost. I had a google for ways to recover it but the only programs need to be bought. Try googling recover digital camera data.

 

[tdshepard]

"This is not a valid JPEG-JFIF file".

This tells us that the file is most likely a JFIF containing JPEG-compressed format. The app identified the file type but could not make sense of the data when it tried to read it.

any ideas what I can do?

There are lots of possibilities:

1. Try opening the file with a different application. ImageMagick and Gimp would be good apps to try.
2. Load the file back onto your camera and see if your camera can display it.
3. Try opening the file on a different computer, including a computer that uses a different byte order than yours.
4. Learn the gory details about the file format, examine the binary contents, and try to figure out what is wrong (yuck). Run the app that is trying to read the file under a debugger.
5. Email one sample file to me at [email protected] and I will see if I can read or recover. You have to use the word "nospam" in the subject line to send me email or my system will bounce it.
6. And I should have started with: Try reading the files directly from the cd on your computer or reloading them from the cd onto your computer.

The photos were burnt onto a cd by a photo lab in TeAnau, I clicked through them at the time (they ask you to check) - and they all seemed to work fine... But now I can't run them! And I tried on the DVD player first, and then on my dvd, and then on the computer..

I assume you kept the cd, right? If so, then you know the files on the cd are readable since you have seen them with your very own eyes.

I have since formatted the memory card & taken more photos on it... Would I still be able to recover them?

Extremely unlikely. If you knew enough about computer programming to do this, you probably would not be asking for help on this forum.

Feel free to email me a photo if you are still having problems.

 

[fadingaway1986]

Thanks guys...

In the store - they say to check them. But as we had crammed so much into such a short time (in way of going to so many places) I really wouldn't have a clue what the last picture was supposed to be.. But no blank files came up when I looked...

The photos were taken with my Fujifilm A210 - which writes in JPEG format, and doesn't have an option for anything else... The first 160 photos (from that burn session) work, and I also got them to put the rest of my photos onto the same cd a couple of days later, and they also all work...

I will try downloading the likes of gimp, and also that bad copy pro that meysha suggested.

Thanks, will let you know how I go...

tdshepard - I will email you one, thanks... They are about 800kb, so I hope that doesn't put you over your limit.

Thanks again, Alecia.