Recuva recovered my photos, but they're grey or broken

Recuva often finds every deleted photo on a memory card, with its name and size. Yet many of them open grey from halfway down, shifted sideways, or with a strip of another photo in them. Here is what Recuva can and can't know about a deleted photo, what its colours mean, and what can still be done.

What Recuva knows about a deleted photo

Think of a memory 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 a photo is deleted, its name, its size and the number of its first box usually stay on the card. The rest of the list, which boxes came after that, is cleared. So Recuva does the only thing it can: it starts at the first box and takes the boxes that follow, one after the other, until it has as many bytes as the photo had.

If the photo was stored in one piece, that is exactly the photo, and it opens fine. But when the card was nearly full, or photos had been deleted in between, the camera stored the rest of the photo in free boxes further along. Then Recuva takes the boxes in between too, and those belong to another file, very often another photo.

What Recuva's colours mean for photos

• Excellent (green): as far as Recuva can tell, none of the photo's boxes were used again.
• Poor or Very poor (orange): some of its boxes now belong to other files. The Comment column says how many were overwritten.
• Unrecoverable (red): most or all of it was written over.

Recuva can't see whether a photo was stored in one piece, so even a green photo can come out broken. And an orange one is often mostly fine: the top of the picture is usually there, and the rest is out of place rather than gone. Recover the orange ones too.

Normal scan or Deep Scan

The normal scan works from the card's list, which is why the photos keep their names. The Deep Scan reads the whole card and looks for photos by their content, the way PhotoRec does. It finds photos whose entry in the list is gone too (after formatting, for example), usually without their names. It has the same problem with photos stored in pieces.

What you see

• a strip of another photo, or grey, where the boxes of another file 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: the end of the photo was in boxes Recuva didn't take.

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.

• Recover to another drive, never to the card itself: every file written to the card can cover one you still want.
• Keep every file Recuva found, the broken and the orange 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.
• If the same photo is also on an old CD, another card or a backup, keep that copy too: the repair can take what is missing in one copy from the other.