How to fix slightly corrupted jpeg files

[ShadowWraith]

I recovered a lot of beloved photos from a drive which previously had XP and on which I installed Ubuntu with the recovery program foremost.

Many images show a thumbnail preview of the entire image, but when opened in an image viewer show only a part of the image and sometimes some colored lines. Since a thumbnail was generated, the images are obviously somewhat salvageable. What can I use to save them?

[SecretCode]

I've heard good things about photorec, but it's mainly for recovering files from a corrupted drive / filesystem, not for fixing individual files, so might not help you.

The other bit of bad news I have is that jpeg files can store a thumbnail separately from the actual image, so your image viewer might be displaying that not reading the original images.

[ShadowWraith]

Thank you! I will look into Photorec, but since I ran the recovery on a physical hard disk which is in use, and not an image (I don't have space for one), I'm afraid the data integrity will only get worse and worse.

Thank you for the information about the thumbnail! While depressing, it may explain the situation. Luckily, many photos were completely saved and ARE fully openable.

Does anyone know of anything else?