Weird Jpeg Issue

[Kerbouchard]

A co-worker of mine just got back from a trip to Europe and some of their JPEG files are not opening, so she asked me to take a look at them.

I'm baffled. She said she has never formatted the cards in camera, so I'm almost sure that is the cause, but I'm still trying to figure out a solution.

Basically, no programs recognize the file type, and in explorer, it is saying the pictures are around 356 megs. That's not possible. They are .jpg. They were taken with a Coolpix camera, and she has, what explorer says, is about 22 gigs worth of them on a 600 mb CDR.

So, obviously, something is wrong in the header information that is instructing windows how to open or deal with the file. Just not sure if there is a way to fix it.

Anybody ever ran into an issue like this before?

 

[Tomasko]

Do those images show ok on the preview lcd on the camera?
Try to open it in a different computer/device/whatever, to see if the problem persists.

 

[Robin Usagani]

try connecting the camera to the puter instead of taking the card out.

 

[480sparky38 37]

Is she trying to view them with a card reader? Some card readers aren't set up to work with high-gigamemory cards. Try reading them through the camera and see if that works.

 

[Kerbouchard]

Unfortunately, none of those options are possible. When they were traveling in Europe, every few days, she hooked her camera to her computer, transfered the files, burned them to a CD, and then deleted them off her memory card.

I told her to try some memory disk recovery software to see what hasn't been overwritten, yet.

She brought me the cd. Some pics are fine. Some say they are 340 megabytes a piece and can't be opened. It's just weird.

I can't figure out why explorer would think a file is 1000 times larger than it actually is.

 

[480sparky38 37]

Bad CD. Simple as that.

 

[analog.universe]

Sounds like the FAT on the CD to me as well. Very unreliable for essential storage, optical media is.

edit: I wonder if a bit-wise file recovery program could reconstruct them off the cd. If it's just the FAT that's corrupted, the data itself should still be intact.

 

[Kerbouchard]

Learned new info. It wasn't just on the CD. Apparently, she had also saved them to her laptop and burned a CD. Files were bad in both locations.

In any case, we used a memory card recovery tool and recovered all of her photos, including the first ones she had taken with that camera, so she got everything back.

She also said she will start formatting her memory card in camera instead of using windows explorer to move and delete photos, so hopefully, that will prevent this from happening again.

Thanks to all for the help.