Repairing corrupted JPEGs

[Lars Noodén]

What utility is good for repairing corrupted JPEGs that won't open with eog or gimp?

[sudodus]

Do you know how they are corrupted? Made with a particular program/camera or damaged somehow?

[FakeOutdoorsman]

Please provide a sample file.

[Lars Noodén]

Ok. Looking at it more refreshed, the worst "corruption" problem comes from a failure in eog's error message. If a file is missing eog reports it this way:



No images found in file:///home/user/Pictures/foo.jpeg


So eog, needs a better error message. Gimp does better, I was just misreading it.

The EXIF data is where the problems seem to lie. I'm getting two kinds of error messages.



Corrupt data
The data provided does not follow the specification.
ExifLoader: The data supplied does not seem to contain EXIF data.


I've attached a JPEG sample with the above error.



Corrupt data
The data provided does not follow the specification.
ExifMnoteCanon: Invalid zero-length tag size


That one seems to be because of a missing date - time stamp in the images. It might have been a fault in the camera. It looks like the work-around is to use jhead to try to set the date manually.

[Lars Noodén]

Trying the attachment again. It seems not to upload.

[FakeOutdoorsman]

I get no such messages from gimp 2.8.8 (or in the console) upon opening this file.

[Lars Noodén]

gimp is ok with that one, where to I find the exif data in gimp?

The eog error is due to an inaccurate error message with regards to missing files, something which doesn't apply because this file actually exists: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eog/+bug/1251562

/usr/bin/exif has trouble and chokes on it though. It says :

Corrupt data
The data provided does not follow the specification.
ExifLoader: The data supplied does not seem to contain EXIF data.

[FakeOutdoorsman]

gimp is ok with that one, where to I find the exif data in gimp?
I'm not sure (but I was too lazy to search).


/usr/bin/exif has trouble and chokes on it though.
I can confim that on 0.6.21, but this might be its standard behavior although it did the same on all inputs that I added some exif info to with exiftool. I'll blame exif.

exiftool (libimage-exiftool-perl package) works fine:

$ exiftool 100_193.jpg
ExifTool Version Number : 9.27
File Name : 100_193.jpg
Directory : .
File Size : 13 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2013:11:15 09:54:34-09:00
File Access Date/Time : 2013:11:15 09:54:34-09:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2013:11:15 09:54:34-09:00
File Permissions : rw-r--r--
File Type : JPEG
MIME Type : image/jpeg
JFIF Version : 1.01
Resolution Unit : inches
X Resolution : 230
Y Resolution : 230
Comment : AppleMark.
Image Width : 240
Image Height : 180
Encoding Process : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample : 8
Color Components : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling : YCbCr4:2:2 (2 1)
Image Size : 240x180

[Lars Noodén]

Ok, thanks. I'll work with exiftool for a while on these jpegs.

[Dee Jay]

Ok. Looking at it more refreshed, the worst "corruption" problem comes from a failure in eog's error message. If a file is missing eog reports it this way:
...
Corrupt data
The data provided does not follow the specification.
ExifMnoteCanon: Invalid zero-length tag size

That one seems to be because of a missing date - time stamp in the images. It might have been a fault in the camera. It looks like the work-around is to use jhead to try to set the date manually.

FWIW, I have never seen this error in my exif data until today. After identifying the faulty images I realized that it was caused by using Windows Explorer's "Rotate clockwise" or "Rotate counterclockwise" on the images.