Best Ways to Repair Damaged and Corrupt Image Files

Photos are integral part of your life. With handy mobile devices, high-end cameras, and easy image sharing options, you may have thousands of photos with you. These photos are stored in your camera memory card, computer, SSD, or memory stick etc.

However, unfortunately digital photos are prone to corruption. Over the time your device may get damaged, a virus can corrupt the file or the photo can get damaged during faulty file transfer.

If your photos are corrupt, distorted, show strange color lines, don’t open, or throw error, then here we bring the methods to repair corrupt photos of any file format. You can repair JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, RAW camera files, and other image files using these techniques.

Why your photos get damaged or corrupt?

There can be various reasons for damage or corruption in digital photos from technical errors to human faults.

As mentioned above, digital photos are stored on PC, Mac, memory card, pen drive, USB flash drive, SD card or other media. If these photo storage devices are not managed properly, it can lead to photo corruption.

For instance, if you continue to save photos in an already full SD card, there is high chance some of the stored photos to get corrupt.

Let’s know such common scenarios that lead photo corruption:   

  • The storage drive has developed bad sectors and turned corrupt. As a result the images stored in it got damaged.
  • Because of absence of anti-virus, your computer is virus or malware infected that corrupted the image files.
  • You try to save photos in a removable media that had no free space.
  • You record photos even when camera battery is low.
  • Suddenly the image file transfer process stopped due to power shutdown, device disconnect or other reasons.
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How to repair corrupt photos

The best and easiest way to repair any kind of corrupt photos is by using an efficient photo repair software. Photo repair software can fix corruption in file header and data. You can fix color issues in image files, greyed-out photos, or even those showing error when trying to open using the software.

Apart from repair software, there are some other techniques too that can help, when photos are not opening on your computer due to unsupported file format.

You can try these techniques to fix the issue in your photos. These manual approaches shared below may work sometime, when the photos don’t open at all on your computer:

Update your image viewer app: Updates help to fix any issue in an application. May be the older version of your photo viewer doesn’t support the file format you are trying to open. If your image viewer is not able to open photos, try updating it once. Be it Windows Photo Viewer, IrfanView, Photoshop Elements, update and then open the photos.

Open your photos in different program: Try another software to open your photos. It can be possible your photo viewing program doesn’t support the file format. Try Paint, Photoshop, Lightroom and others.

3 Ways to fix damaged or corrupt photos

  1. Repair image files with photo repair tool
  2. Fix corrupt photos using Hex Editor
  3. Convert image file format

Repair image files with a photo repair tool

A professional photo repair software ensures that your image file’s corrupt header, damaged data, invalid file structure, invalid JPEG marker, etc., are fixed, which result in damage or errors in photos.

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There are several photo repair tools available. But choosing the right repair software can be an ardent task. Not every software can repair all types of photo corruption issues.

Software like Stellar Repair for Photo can easily fix grainy, blurry, color lines, grey bands, and other distortions in digital photos by repairing the file structure. It supports popular image file formats like JPEG, JPG, PNG, DNG, and TIFF. You can even repair uncompressed RAW photos from DSLR and other digital cameras from Canon, Fuji, Sony, Nikon etc. If your photos have severe corruption, the software suggests ‘Advance Repair’ using the sample image file of same format. You can also obtain the thumbnails of the corrupt photos with this software.

Its better, you try the free version of the software before making the purchase decision. Some software show the preview in the free trial that helps to make the right decision.

Fix corrupt photos using Hex Editor tool

Hex Editors can display the binary data of an image file. By viewing the image file’s byte by byte structure, the photo corruption issue can be identified.

The software lets you to compare the two image files. You can view the binary data of a healthy image file and use this information to repair corrupt image in Hex Editor. Once the appropriate data is inserted, your photos should open properly. Hex Editors are helpful in repairing corrupt image file header.

As evident, to use the tool you should have knowledge about hexadecimal codes and binary digits.

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Some commonly used Hex Editors are HxD, UltraEdit, HexEd.it, Hex Fiend, and others.

Convert image file format

Usually image files in RAW format don’t open in photo viewer programs. This is mostly because, your photo viewer may not be offering support for uncompressed photo formats such as CR3, NEF, RAF, ARW, etc. As a result photos won’t open and become inaccessible. Try once by converting your photos to JPEG/ JPG, PNG, TIFF or other format. You can use any secure free online image file converter program for this.

Conclusion

Hex editor can repair corrupt file header in photos but it is not for novice users. The photo repair software approach is simpler, fast, and also ensures all kinds of image file corruption are fixed automatically. The photos are back to their original pristine form in no time. Moreover, an advanced photo repair software can repair multiple images of any format in one go.