Please Help Fix My Corrupt Wedding JPEGs
 

I'll keep the story short. We hired a wedding photographer that was very arrogant and said he was basically the grandmaster of all photographers in Western PA. He's an old snake that may have been good 20 years ago, but he has let himself go and scams people on their wedding pictures. This guy lied about what he was giving us and then when we called him out on it he threatened to take away our wedding pictures. He yelled at us, bringing my wife to tears, and told us to take the crappy pictures he was giving us and smile on our way out the door. We have since brought a lawsuit against him and won because of his dishonest scamming ways.

With that background in mind... The photographer had about 125 images he took that got saved on a flashdrive as corrupted files. He refused to give us the SanDisc SD card the images were on, but instead copied, pasted, and burned the files onto a cd for us. We have the cd. The files are corrupt and cannot be opened. They appear to be saved as JPEG files but he told us that he shoots in RAW on some Cannon camera he used. I have tried about 20 forms of freeware on the web trying to get these JPEGs to open. I have also sought answers all over the place. I'm stumped.

I am really hoping to give these Wedding images to my wife for Christmas. Because they are precious to us I am willing to pay for your time and efforts if you can truly get it open. At this point I have been too afraid to pay for software or big tech guys who may in the end just say "yeah, you're screwed." If you can open them I would be willing to give you at least something for your efforts. I have uploaded a couple of the files to 4shared. They can be accessed at this address: http://www.4shared.com/dir/24915904/...3/sharing.html If it would be more helpful to have a copy of the full cd, I can make one and mail it your way. Also, if you just want to reply with suggestions I'm fair game for that too.

I appreciate you taking the time to look at my post. I am especially grateful for those who may try to fix them and come up short. I have given you all the info I know up to this point and thank you for your time. Thanks again.

Brendan

I think it'll be a lot better if you publish a few of them in a public, decent web service. Say picasa, whatever. I don't think there's people who will jump to help you when this is one of the well known ways social hacking works.

Taking them from a trustful public server will inspire more confidence in your possible helpers.

Good luck.

Sorry to hear of your nightmare..

First, I strongly recommend removing your e-mail address from your post. This is simply inviting a spamming.

Second, I would have assumed that any legal action would have including getting all your pictures in a usable form---what exactly did you win?

If you post something on a public site, I'll be happy to take a look.

I have looked at the files you provided here**:
http://www.4shared.com/dir/24915904/...3/sharing.html

For all the ones I looked at, there appears to be nothing but random data (which is how one would expect a photo file to look)--what is missing is any kind of header or formatting info. I tried various normal programs (GIMP, Imagemagick, etc.) and 2 recovery utilities:
jpeg recover: A windows program which seems to happily run on WINE
photorec (part of the testdisk suite)

Neither one showed any sign of working.

As I think about it, with only random data, there really is no way for a recovery utility to work---ie how it would it know how to interpret the data without some form of header info?

I am not prepared to say that recovery is impossible. If I were to dig further, I would first research the jpeg file format, and then experiment with creating headers for the files. My hunch is that it would be a major "needle-in-a-haystack" problem.


So--back to my question about the the lawsuit: What exactly did you win?

**OP sent this by private e-mail. I'm keeping the discussion on the forum.

Wonder if they are nikon or cannon type of files that have been renamed.

I would try renaming the part after the dot to other formats, maybe they are not JPEGs.

Speaking to the 2 previous posts: No, and No. The files are strictly random data with no headers. There is no evidence of any format id, etc. Photorec does not recover anything useful.

But---try one.

True and true, as binary format it does not even contain meaningful/descriptive data. It is all open/close marks. It is all meaningless random stuff for me.

Really wanted to give good news, sorry...

Maybe they are raw?
Download/run GIMP, Select file->open select the file mask as all files.
* expand the little arrows down
* select raw as the filetype
* open the picture - alittle dialog should come up
* set the height as high as it will go and select a format of RGB
* slowly slide the width up and down to see if you see the images

You mentioned the photographer shoots RAW on a Canon camera. I do the same, and I thought it might be a .Canon CR2 RAW file. I downloaded one and tried renaming .JPG to .CR2 and opening it in Camera Raw, but unfortunately it did not recognize it.

I'm curious why this question is in a Linux forum since it does not appear to have anything to do with Linux. Maybe you would have better luck in a photography forum.

No such luck... Once again, the whole file appears to be random---no header information whatsoever. This means there is no information to tell **any** SW which data means what.

I am really sorry for the loss.

I haven't good news either. However I have an idea, I really don't expect it to work, I don't think that this guy really handed the photos, he probably just filled a few files with garbage just to annoy you even more. But just in case... You can try photorec over the raw cd device, like this:

Change sr0 by whatever your cd drive is (scd0, cdrom, dvd or whatever device node fits your cdrom drive). Just to try something...

Thanks for your help so far
 

I want to thank everyone for their help so far. I haven't tried all of the suggestions yet, but I feel like I'm getting some great leads.

Someone asked about the lawsuit and I am sorry I didn't not reply before. In the original contract the photographer promised a "High Resolution" cd with all pictures being able to printed at 8X10 with no issues. Instead, he gave us low resolution pictures and proceeded to convince us that because he had an interpolation program on his computer that would print big pictures then we did indeed have a high resolution cd. We sued over the "high resolution" cd and the magistrate awarded us $400 or so because the cd was far from high resolution.

Someone also mentioned potentially taking my concern to another blog. I am far from computer savy and have little experience with tech blogs. However, I did post other places but I think they are largely inactive. If you have suggestions for other blogs, or want to direct people to my files on other blogs feel free. Thanks again for all of your help.

I thought of another way for you to seek for help:

http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/

ImageMagick is the de-factor standard tool for graphics in Linux. It supports more graphics formats than the rest of tools that I know of. So, I would try looking for an ImageMagick developer there in their forum. If there's someone that knows about graphics formats in Linux, it must be around there. However I don't use their forums and I have no idea if the developers of the package go around there on a regular basis or not. They might live on their mailing lists instead or elsewhere, you can try that as well.

As said on the other post, I am not even sure that your photos are there at all. But if someone can be sure about that, I guess it's these guys...

I think there's a good possibility that they are indeed jpeg files, from the statistics of the files.

However, the bad news is that if they are jpegs the headers are missing or completely corrupted ... irrecoverable unless you have at least one file that opens.

It's hard to believe that not a single one of the files has an intact header, because I have gotten corrupted jpegs before, but most of the time a few of them had the header intact and were merely truncated.

Anyway, do try using foremost on the files, something like:
that should recover anything that has a header, most of it will be junk, but there might be a few jpeg or maybe they were another file type ...

Oh, and sorry to hear about the mishap, I'll think twice before I choose my wedding photographer ... or maybe I'll do it myself.