I am not talking about when you accidentally erased your camera’s memory or it got damaged, there are already plenty of solutions for that. What I want is to fix photos that have somehow been corrupted. In my case, photos of my Grandmother’s 80th birthday were put on a bad CD (not by me). Not that many were damaged, but it has annoyed me for several years that I couldn’t recover them. Finally I thought I found the solution with PixRecovery.
Turns out it does little or nothing at least for my images. Looking into the files I can see why nothing could be fixed. The bad areas are mostly full of null characters from the bad CD read. At the time I copied them I attempted reading them in lots of different ways to recover anything possible. I did get several back or at least less damaged copies. I also ended up with a bunch more that showed damage so I presume the built in CD error correction was helping a lot. PixRecovery wasn’t able to do anything even with the less damaged files either, there was still a block of about 2000 nulls in a row even in the least damaged image. There just wasn’t anything to recover in those spots which throws off the whole rest of the image.
It is nice though that they provide a demo version so you can see if it works. I am sure for some people it must work. But since the full version costs $149.00 I am kind of glad it didn’t help. I only had a few bad images, but if it works for you and you have more than a few that need fixing, that is certainly worth the price if your photos are important.
Anyone know of any other solutions? Even realigning the blocks (and hopefully color) with a blank spot in the middle would be an improvement for these images.
Did you ever find a program that didn’t suck? PixRecovery did next to nothing for me (thank goodness I didn’t pay for that s**t).
Not yet. I pretty much gave up trying to find anything. It just doesn’t seem to exist.