PhotoRec recovered my photos, but they're broken

Programs like PhotoRec, Recuva or Disk Drill can find photos on a card that no longer opens. But many of the photos they bring back are broken: grey from halfway down, shifted sideways, or with a strip of a different photo in them. Here is why, and what can still be done.

A card is a long shelf of boxes

Think of a memory card as a long shelf of numbered boxes. A photo fills many boxes. The card also keeps a list of which boxes belong to which photo.

Usually a photo's boxes are next to each other. But when the card was nearly full, or photos were deleted in between, the camera puts the rest of a photo into whatever boxes are free, further along the shelf.

What PhotoRec does

When the card is damaged, its list is gone. So PhotoRec looks for the box where a photo starts, and then simply takes the boxes that follow, one after the other, until the photo looks finished. It has no way to know that your photo continued somewhere else.

If your photo was stored in two parts, the boxes in between are taken too. They belong to another file, very often another photo.

What you see

A photo viewer shows the file as it is. Your photo is fine at the top, and then it goes wrong:

• a strip of another photo, or grey, where the boxes in between were;
• the rest of your photo shifted sideways and in the wrong colours: it is all there, but read in the wrong place (why);
• grey at the bottom when PhotoRec stopped too early.

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. To do that it uses the small preview the camera stores inside every photo. The strip that was really lost is filled in, so it looks a bit blurry. The rest is your original photo.

• Keep every file PhotoRec found, also the broken and the very small ones, 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 (its beginning is missing) can often still be repaired with the help of an intact photo taken with the same camera.