I've recovered some JPGs with a data recovery program, but they come out looking like this: and there's no preview image. And when I click to open it, I get this message:"The file Jpg could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn't recognize."
So how do I repair my Jpg images with this problem? BTW I'm using El Capitan on a 2008 iMac.
null-OTHER, Data Recovery for OS X iMacs
They're likely not JPEG images. That is, the recovery software assigned the wrong file type extension to something else.
You can sometimes figure out what a file should be by dropping it into TextEdit. You'll see a lot of garbage characters as TextEdit tries to make sense out a binary file displayed as text. But, what you might find in the clear text (readable English words) are things like the name of the app that created it, file type/encoding, or other clues that may help you determine what it is.
Kurt Lang wrote:
They're likely not JPEG images. That is, the recovery software assigned the wrong file type extension to something else.
You can sometimes figure out what a file should be by dropping it into TextEdit. You'll see a lot of garbage characters as TextEdit tries to make sense out a binary file displayed as text. But, what you might find in the clear text (readable English words) are things like the name of the app that created it, file type/encoding, or other clues that may help you determine what it is.
Interesting because I've accidentally opened JPG files in Text edit before but never paid attention to the text that popped up... So do I look for amidst the text to determine what kind of file it is?
If you cannot open the image in Preview, then there is little to be done with it, or without far deeper technical inspection. If you can open it, the Preview Inspector will tell you more about the image. A fall-back might be to try opening the .jpg with a free trial of GraphicConverter.
The recovery software may have just given you a binary data blob, and decided to add the .jpg extension, because it didn't know what else to do with it.
It requires a bit of luck. If you see XML in the text somewhere, then it may be a Word document (from Office 2011 or later); an HTML file; a .plist file, etc. There are quite a few apps that write data as XML. So, you'd have to keep changing the extension and trying to open it after each change.
Others are more straight forward. Such as, you may find the word TIFF. Which is an easy one since you would just change the extension from .jpg to .tif .
Sometimes you may find the creator, such as the word Adobe in the text. With any luck, it also has the particular app named in the text, such as Illustrator or InDesign. If not, you try the various types of extensions the apps use and see which one is correct. That's a lot under Photoshop since it can write a lot of different types of raster images.
It's all hit and miss. There may not be anything in clear text that will give you a clue.
VikingOSX wrote:
If you cannot open the image in Preview, then there is little to be done with it, or without far deeper technical inspection. If you can open it, the Preview Inspector will tell you more about the image. A fall-back might be to try opening the .jpg with a free trial of GraphicConverter.
The recovery software may have just given you a binary data blob, and decided to add the .jpg extension, because it didn't know what else to do with it.
Dumb question, but I'mm ask this anyway, but how do I use the Graphic Converter to determine the state of an image or how to fix it(if possible)?
Kurt Lang wrote:
It requires a bit of luck. If you see XML in the text somewhere, then it may be a Word document (from Office 2011 or later); an HTML file; a .plist file, etc. There are quite a few apps that write data as XML. So, you'd have to keep changing the extension and trying to open it after each change.
Others are more straight forward. Such as, you may find the word TIFF. Which is an easy one since you would just change the extension from .jpg to .tif .
Sometimes you may find the creator, such as the word Adobe in the text. With any luck, it also has the particular app named in the text, such as Illustrator or InDesign. If not, you try the various types of extensions the apps use and see which one is correct. That's a lot under Photoshop since it can write a lot of different types of raster images.
It's all hit and miss. There may not be anything in clear text that will give you a clue.
Well opening it as a tif doesn't work, and when I open the JPG in text edit, I got this in the text:
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If that's the entire thing, that's almost nothing, as far as TextEdit trying to decipher binary as text.
Nothing readable to give you a clue, and unless this was very small, not enough to likely be any type of image.
You may never know what the recovery software pulled off the drive for this particular file is supposed to be. If anything. If could even just be resource fork data for a JPEG. Which wouldn't be the image itself, just the resource data. Which is typically the desktop icon, creation and modification dates, and other small data.
How do I repair JPG images?
