I put you in situation. Imagine that you have mistakenly deleted a folder on your hard drive or USB memory that contained a lot of vitally important photos that had a high emotional value. You perform an image recovery process and you manage to save some of the deleted content, but there is a problem: some of the files that have been restored are damaged and cannot be opened or they are broken. Is there any method to repair such corrupted images?
Why is an image corrupted?
If we refer to the origin of the problem, this usually happens for 2 reasons:
- After deleting the file by mistake, data has been overwritten with new information. When doing the recovery, only part of the original file could be restored.
- The area where the image was stored on the hard drive or pendrive has bad sectors.
- We have downloaded the photo from the Internet or external media and it has only been partially copied. This can make metadata is not displaying correctly and the system does not know how to recognize the file as an image.
Free tools to repair corrupted images
To solve this problem we must bear in mind that there is no manual action that we can do by ourselves. We must install a corrupt photo and image repair program.
Currently there are several tools on the market for this purpose, although many of them are paid. The downside of this type of premium utilities is that you cannot know if it works until you have already paid, which in many cases can mean an unnecessary outlay for something that simply cannot be recovered. Luckily, there are also some pretty good free repair programs ...
EZGif
EZGif is a page that offers a free online image repair tool. Although in principle it is designed to work with corrupt GIFs, the truth is that it is also capable of recover images in other formats, such as JPEG, BMP or PNG.
For this we only have to access the tool from THIS LINK and select the file that we want to fix. Once selected, click on "Upload".
The system will then load the image and offer us 4 repair methods. We are testing one by one, and although in some cases it will throw us an error message, in others we may be able to repair the image correctly.
The truth is that after trying it, it is the one that has given us the best results. Another point in its favor is that being online does not require installation of any kind.
File Repair
We continue with File Repair, a free, ad-free image repair program for Windows. A great tool for fixing corrupted JPG files capable of fixing a large number of errors, although it is not foolproof.
The application is very easy to use. It only has 2 buttons, "Load" and "Repair" (fix). If we have to put a problem, it is that it does not allow to load more than one image at the same time (more or less like the rest of free repair programs).
Download File Repair for Windows
In addition to these two tools, we also have other programs that are advertised as free, such as VG JPEG-Repair and RS File Repair, but after trying them we see that in no case can we recover any image or photograph without going to the checkout and paying for one. license (just let us preview the image).
Therefore, our recommendation is that we focus mainly on these 2 tools that we have mentioned, EZGif and File Repair, and in case of not achieving results, opt for other payment tools such as, for example, Stellar JPEG Repair.
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