Disk Drill found my photos, but they're corrupted

Disk Drill lists the photos it found with a star for their recovery chances. Many of them, often those with Low or Average chances, open grey from halfway down, shifted sideways, or with a strip of another photo in them. Here is what the results mean, why the photos break, and what can still be done.

Where your photos are in the results

Disk Drill sorts what it finds into groups, and they tell you how it found each photo:

• Existing: photos that are still on the card or disk as normal files.
• Deleted or lost: found by the deep scan, which reads the whole card and recognises photos by their content. Their names are usually gone, so they get numbers instead.
• Reconstructed: also found by their content, but with some of their details recovered, such as the date stored in the photo, so Disk Drill can name them more helpfully.

What the stars mean

A full star (High) means the photo's content looks intact. A half star (Average) or an empty one (Low) means Disk Drill found signs that parts of it were changed, for example written over by other files. A question mark means it can't tell. These are estimates, and for photos a Low often means: the top is fine, and the rest is broken but still there.

Why the photos break

Think of the card as a long shelf of numbered boxes. A photo fills many boxes, and the card keeps a list of which boxes belong to which photo. When the list is damaged, or a photo was deleted, the deep scan finds the box where a photo starts and takes the boxes that follow, one after the other.

That works when the photo was stored in one piece. But when the card was nearly full, or photos had been deleted in between, the camera stored the rest of the photo further along the shelf. Then the boxes in between are taken too, and they belong to another file, often another photo.

What you see then:

• a strip of another photo, or grey, where the other file's boxes were;
• the rest of your photo shifted sideways and in the wrong colours: still there, but read in the wrong place (why);
• grey at the bottom when the end of the photo wasn't found.

What can still be done

Most of your photo is usually still in the file, only out of place. memories.repair finds the part that belongs to another file and takes it out, then puts the rest of your photo back where it belongs, using the small preview the camera stores inside every photo. What was really lost is filled in, so it looks a bit blurry. The rest is your original photo.

• Copy the whole card first if it is failing: Disk Drill can make a byte-to-byte backup, and you can then scan the backup instead of the card.
• Recover to another drive, never to the card itself.
• Keep every photo Disk Drill found, the Low and Average ones too, and work on copies.
• Don't open the broken photos in an editor and save them again. Saving throws away the part that the repair needs.
• A photo that doesn't open at all can often still be repaired: what to do.