I can't get it to run. As soon as I start it up, my antivirus program (zonelabs) kills it. Some kind of adloader Trojan is hidden in it.

http://www.brothersoft.com/jpeg-recovery-professional-50310.html says this about files becoming corrupted:

"JPEG Recovery (program is not free) repairs corrupted JPEG picture/photo due to photo/data recovery"
JPEG Recovery is a handy tool to repair corrupted JPEG picture or photo which is Restored by a photo or Data Recovery software. JPEG Recovery supports combining 2 JPEG pictures for recovery, just in case the original picture was split into 2 files by the photo or data recovery software.

For today's free program - how can you go wrong, it is small and might be useful one day.If you have images or photo files you want to keep then you should have a tool like todays giveaway -- Picture Doctor

well, this downloads, installs, and activates easily--and uninstalls just as easily.

I do have some corrupt .jpg files but this didn't fix time.

#16 @Nassem
True enough a .bmp is no replacement for a photoshop file.. but it's BETTER THAN NOTHING ISN'T IT ? If your precious photos were toast, and this could get you some of them back, even as a flat .BMP... I'd be happy about it.

I don't know if this will work or not, b/c like most of you I have nothing corrupted at the moment to try it on- but I'm going to install it as a "just in case" and maybe someday I can try it out.

James

in the installation setup you have misspelled the word desktop in the additional install options....8)

This sounds like a great concept. *Keyword*, "sounds".... I installed program without a problem on Vista Home Premium 32-bit. I had to actually create the output folder, but, no biggie.

I ran a handful of corrupted images through the software. I got the images off my gf's SD card. They had been deleted and I used another GOTD program to fully recover 90% of them. The images basically looked like the tracking was off on a VCR or that "adult" channel you squinted at when you were a kid, that your parents didn't get on cable, but, if you looked reeeeally hard, you could see something....

Anyways, one file I ran through returned as still unopenable and corrupt. The others were exactly the same as I had saved them. I'm not going to give this program too hard of a time, because, I didn't use the original media that the images came from. I think that if I were able to use the original SD card then I may get better results.... I suppose I have another mission: to get the SD card again.

Any other positive results would be great to hear!

@ 41 - Andrew, you cannot save a graphics file with notepad. Regardless of the extension you use (.gif, .jpg, .bmp, etc.), it will save as a text file. Other programs will then think it is some text an not recognize it as graphic data of any format or style. This may explain why you have been unsuccessful at recovery of you "induced" errors.

#3 Whiterabbit aka Stephen:

I have rescued hundreds of DVDs with CRC error using ISO Buster (v2.2) and an old slow DVD drive. My experience is that the problem becomes more severe when the DVD drive becomes hot. Older drives spin slower, and tend to get less hot. ISO Buster stops with a pop-up box when it encounters reading problems. Then I just press the eject button on the DVD drive and leave the program waiting until the drive and the DVD can cool down. After a few minutes I insert the DVD and press retry. This trick has worked on all my old odd brand DVDs. These days I only use Verbatim AZO discs. Those have worked fine for more than 5 years now. Other brands have given CRC errors after one or two years. I have noticed others recommending Isopuzzle. You can try both apps combined with waiting to cool the drive and DVD. Good luck. Hope you can recover your pictures.

I've seen a number of remarks about: how can JPEG's get corrupted.. Well I had this exact problem, where for quite a few of my pictures the colors where completely wrong. Faces of persons had a blue color, backgrounds had a strange green color... using photoshop and a few other programs could not help restore the pictures in their old glory, and these pictures where very dear to me.
I couldn't find anything on the internet that could solve my problem.
I just tried picturedoctor on these photos (I did not believe this could work at first either) and to my surprise this program managed to restore all these pictures!
Many thanks to GAOTD (and the developer of this program) for helping me out!

too bad my main system is down, I've got a few hundred corrupted jpegs from early learning problems on the hp m517- but those are on a dvd-r awaiting some type of fix. this laptop only has a cd drive.


as far as thumbnails good/image bad in jpg files, there is a stored thumbnail before the main image data that most graphics programs use by default because it's faster than reading the whole image and creating thumbnails.


I'm installing this program for later testing but not too hopeful of it doing much beyond correcting headers- if that.

also, FWIW dvd-r is much more robust as a storage medium than cd-r; built far sturdier- so far 0% bit-rot over 1000 discs and ~5 years, cd-r 25%+ failure to one degree or another over the same period. the thin label-side laquer simply does not hold up.

unless this program outputs 24-bit per pixel bitmaps, it's pretty useless anyway- the site is a bad joke.

Good concept, not the best execution. For example, it'd help if Vista/7 was officially supported, and if more image formats were supported.

And the price ...!

My alternative, is to open up the corrupted image with Irfanview. If it works, I take a screencap and then crop off the "bad" part, usually at the bottom for some reason or another.

Also, Recuva also works if the data loss was recent. (E.G. Mom was messing with my new camera WITHOUT MY PERMISSION and accidentally formatted it. I didn't take any more pictures until I could get it hooked up to the computer. Recuva pulled them all off.)

@Whiterabbit aka Stephen:

The solution for your problem (hundreds of CRC-Errors for images stored on DVD) may be the freeware tool isopuzzle. It helped me to restore a huge amount of mp3 files from CDs. But it is not specialised on mp3s. It's not specialised on any kind of files but on trying to read the sectors and rebuild an image file. If it cannot read a sector, it will retry and retry and retry and slowing down drivespeed to increase chances of success. It has many more features to increase probability of success and it is a must have tool if you have data archived on CD or DVD.

I had many files damaged after an accidental data lost and a half-successful recovery of them (SD camera card.) I tried a sample of 15 jpeg files, and this program repaired most of them, only 2 pics were not recovered. So, I think it is a keeper for me!

@#1
I've had some images come up like half rendered before for seemingly no reason. Luckily it's never been any pics I've taken, but just images I've saved from the web or something. Not sure if this program would help that. I usually just delete them, so I don't have any to try either, unfortunely. I don't see how this program could fix those images, if they're incomplete though.

Many times, images that are undeleted (or recovered) off of digital storage media will be incomplete, corrupt or truncated after the recovery process. This is where this software comes in handy.

Normally I try only to recommend freeware alternatives which I consider to be outstanding, and have been thoroughly tried and tested by myself. However, only a couple of days ago Shell Extension City (my favourite freeware digging site) pointed me to what appears to be an interesting freeware utility, which just might one day prove to be a useful complement to Recuva and MultiStage Recovery (both of which I do use often).

Greenfish Corporation is a Hungarian based software company, producing only freeware. To quote from the Greenfish DataMiner introductory help document:

This software can be used for recovering lost data from optical disks, such as CD's or DVD's. It should support all types of optical disks and uses an intelligent heuristic to recognize files which cannot be seen using a file manager. You may need Greenfish DataMiner if you have a scratched or damaged disk, one with a corrupt or unknown file system or a rewritable disk which has accidentally been overwritten. The program can recognize BMP, ICO, CUR, ANI, AVI, CDA, PAL, QCP, RMI, WAV, RIFF, 7Z, BZ2, CAB, GZ, HQX, NRI, RAR, RPM, SIT, SQX, TAR, UHA, ZIP, ZOO, AIFF, AMR, AU, FLAC, MID, MP3, OGG, DOC, XLS, PPT, CHM, MDB, PDF, PSD, PSP, SIB, SQLITE, EXE, DLL, CHR, BGI, CLASS, DCU, ELF, GM6, PPU, TI calculator, RES, TLB, TPU, DCX, EMF, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, TIF, WMF, ASF, RA, RM, MOV, MPG, SWF, VOB, LNK and SFK files, and various types of text files, including source codes, HTML and LaTeX files.

Don't expect bells and whistles - but from my early looks at this program, it does appear to be an interesting - and (just potentially) valuable addition to my toolbox. It's only a 300 kb download, and needs no install. I suppose only time will tell if Greenfish DataMiner might ever give Picture Doctor a run for it's money, or whether I'm just linking to (an untested) red herring. But with a 300kb download, which needs no installation, there's not too much to lose in waiting patiently to try....

This software is barely usable. It really does not do much. There are rare occasions that even if it worked correctly would it be of any use. Pass on this unless you feel the need to download something today.

I see assraf has only posted under his other name Happy Person today. Does he not know that we all know that he and him are the same person.
Too funny.

The Softorbits page for Picture Doctor relies on customer testimonials to explain what the program can do, rather than giving their own explanations and examples of usage, which is not a good sign for what could possibly be an overpriced data recovery program. Customer testimonials should be a small part of the advertising, not the entire campaign.

My main problem with the software, not that I even have any way to test it yet, is that it claims to recover layer data for .psd files, but how is that useful if the recovered image is saved as a .bmp?

I tried to open Jpeg files with notepad, and intentionally corrupting it by deleting here and there, and saving it back to jpeg image and then correcting it with Picture Doctor, but always failed. So, maybe, I thought, the picture has to be corrupted less for recovery. So, with the same procedure, I corrupted my picture less by deleting less here and there, and then tried again to recover, but again failed. So far, 100% failure to recover 5 images I intentionally corrupted.

To all those comparing size of the download with price - program size these days is controlled by graphics and not by code. I have no need for this software myself, but as a software professional I always try to make my software as small as possible - and that is hard work!
Are you also impressed by a big carton holding a tiny item? When you go to buy an mp3 player, do you choose the biggest and heaviest?
Grow up...

Lacking any type of control test files or a workable definition of "corrupted", I feel that some of these comments are overly critical. We should all know that files can be corrupted beyond any possibility of recovery. One comment alluded to the fact that an author putting a $100 price tag on his product must have some confidence that his product is a significant improvement over a simple file recovery program. I agree. Lacking evidence to the contrary, a developer would be burying himself in a very deep hole - perhaps too deep to climb out of for a very long time.

I would suggest that a BMP image of readable quality could be an improvement over complete garbage boasting a high quality graphic suffix. "Happy Person" did not find any "cons" to report on the program and neither did I. Given two evaluations, both of which are completely truthful, I tend to put more confidence in the evaluation and report stating a program' s good points as well as also pointing out areas where it may be lacking over an evaluation that is completely one-sided - regardless of the side it takes. To me that's human nature.

Don't complain for price.Complain allways for quality.This soft can be yours and free forever.So,where is this big price?.

Ideally no one will or would ever need Picture Doctor, just like in a perfect world Recuva wouldn't exist. But *Stuff* happens, & if that includes losing some photos you want/need, thanks to GOTD you can try Picture Doctor to see if it works on any partially recovered &/or damaged image files. If it works, Great, but if it doesn't there are usually alternatives, whether that means trying again to recover the complete file or trying something like PhotoRescure [datarescue.com].

If you pick up Picture Doctor today, & if at any time it doesn't work for you, what have you lost? And if it recovers one priceless (to you) pic out of dozens, what is recovering that pic worth?

Personally I've been very lucky & haven't had flash memory card problems [they happen -- flash memory dies], & I try to be overly redundant about backing up pics [& anything stored on Flash memory] to CDs/DVDs, so I don't know if there's a better alternative to Picture Doctor or not from experience.

---------------

#12: "Is it a file recovery program (but only for pics). If so, what good is recovering them as a BMP? So, it supports PSD files, what good is that if they are recovered as a BMP?!"

If it's a very ordinary pic that you've spent huge amounts of time doctoring, & wish to doctor further, then perhaps a flattened version stored as a .bmp would be of little use. If OTOH it's a really great shot, or the only 1 you have of a family member or event, a single layer bmp could be priceless to you. A psd file is after all only good if/when you want to preserve layers working on an image, & is relatively useless once you're done, & you convert to jpeg or whatever.

* * *

#19: "It’s entirely possible that these were just too badly damaged to recover (which I find absolutely hilarious because I can preview them in thumbnail view and they’re perfect..."

It could be a prob with the app, or you might have the thumbnails already created/stored on your system?

* * *

#21: "As for how images can get corrupt, on Windows XP and prior OS’s, whenever you told the computer to defragment, it would occasionally screw up the images."

[mydefrag.com/Manual-KnownProblems.html] & [mydefrag.com/Manual-FrequentlyAskedQuestions.html] have some good info on problems with Windows defrag api etc. Mydefrag is the successor to jkdefrag, one of the most popular & well respected defrag apps out there [Google], so you can have some confidence in what's written on those pages. Far as defragging itself screwing up images, to me that seems a bit misleading... [Knock wood] haven't seen a problem defragging drives on our PCs regularly for more than a decade.

That said, there's no substitute for backing up data, & making sure valuable content (things like family pics) are duplicated/stored in more than one place or on more than one disc etc. When defragging, you're writing to sectors/clusters sequentially -- one or more of those could be bad, & you don't know it yet because no data was stored there. Defragging also stresses a hard drive by using it continuously -- you could have a hard drive getting ready to fail, & this could push it over the edge. That doesn't mean don't defrag, as either sort of problem is already there if you have it -- you just don't know it yet.

Thanks for all the useful info provided about the various causes of corrupted files.

Better to backup important files, including those on CDs/DVDs, as it is a known fact the CDs/DVDs media will deteriorate after two to three years, even without any frequent read/write.

Cyclic redundancy appear when use some Version of Nero(6,7 etc).I use now:Cd burner Xp and this problems not appear from a long time but appear others problems from time to time and is necesary to uninstall and reinstall CD burner Xp.

OK, it saves it to a .bmp file. Seems that GAOTD has offered enough converters that this should not be an issue. Whether the program really works is what concerns me. From the comments it sounds like the developers need to go back to the drawing board.

The Shootist (#7) has the best idea. Backup what you want to save. Preferably on different drives and set up a system to occasionally check on burned CD's that have pictures you cherish. Reburn them before they deteriorate.

I've been coming here for over a month now and 99% of the software offered is crappy video converters or has a lot better alternative on the freeware sites. I think I am done. I'm just going to start donating to the good freeware developers, they seem to be doing a better job and don't ask for much.
$99 for this are you insane?

#3: "I have hundreds of images stored on DVD’s that are unreadable because of cyclic redundancy. I’m not sure whether this program is suitable for such errors though."

You 1st have to recover the files Stephen... There are a few apps that specialize in that sort of thing from CD/DVD discs [it is different from hard drives], & if one of those partially recovered an image file or files, Picture Doctor's job is to try & fix them.

If it helps, much of the time DVDs are unreadable when the surface is damaged, or if the drive that burned them was *off*, & is no longer available. I used to see/read a lot about DVDs physically deteriorating, & have experienced it myself with some incredibly poor quality blanks I once picked up... AFAIK it's not such a big issue anymore -- didn't see anything on the 1st couple pages when I Googled on DVD Bloom [separation of the plastic layers with deterioration of the chemical layer that recorded the data]. If that chemical layer is damaged, not a whole lot you can do, but scratches can often be polished away, & using as many different drives as you can, recovery software might piece quite a bit of data together.

Might look at [videohelp.com/tools/IsoPuzzle], &/or [cdroller.com/] as well as check cdfreaks.com [myce.com]. For CRC errors [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check]. Competition to Picture Doctor [datarescue.com].

#4 - Base a program on its ability to do the job, not on the size of the file. Would you feel better if it did not work but was 50 MB? Usually a small footprint program that works is an efficiently written program. I am going to grab this and hope I never need it. But sooner or latter the unreadable file jumps up and bites everyone.
Thanks GOTD.

I'd love some 'REAL' examples showing this software working. My results...10 recovered semi to highly corrupted images, zero corrected, or fixed up in anyway whatsoever. If anyone has some before and after examples, please share. Backup all important images, this software won't help do much more than shrink your wallet.

Suspect my jpg files were corrupted by DskChk (or something similar on an external hard-drive (not recommended). Just installed & tested Picture Doctor & immediately recovered the first lot of 28 out of 30 of my daughter's wedding 11 years ago. Will do the rest later. The message I was getting originally was "Cannot read this file. This is not a valid bitmap file, or its formt is not currently supported" after trying many different graphic programs. For me "absolutely brilliant" & good luck to all those who have never had a corrupted picture file! Big thumbs up to GOTD for this one.

Tried this on some pictures I had recovered after a hdd failure. The corrupted images only displayed halfway from the top with the bottom half grayed out so I was hoping Picture Doctor would work to fix them. Sad to say, it did not.

As a graphic designer I thought this program might be a useful tool, but I find that I am not at all impressed with this application. tried it on 15 corrupted JPEG images - 3 recovered in usable condition, 8 recovered in worse condition than the corrupted original files, and 4 were unrecoverable. I then tried to recover a corrupted PSD file a friend sent me.. only 5 of the 27 layers were able to be recovered.

Who in their right mind would pay $100.00 for a program with such poor results? My first Double Thumbs DOWN program since i started coming here almost 3 years ago.

Note to developers : if you want to attract photoshop user who want to recover PSD files my suggestion would be to write a much better algorithm and include the ability to save the recovered layers in png format so that you don't lose transparency.

Silver Dragon Systems

Thanks for this article! I've already tried a few recovery programs when I had deleted around 500 images in my pictures folder. With Advanced File Recovery I recovered all images. I like that I can preview files directly in the program without actually recovering them. This program supports different media types such as memory sticks, hard drives, memory cards of digital cameras, floppies, external drives, and others.

I wish i had something to test this one but right now but i dont have any corrupted images. I have in the past created some psd files in photoshop that somehow got corrupted, thats computers for you. I would have liked to try this on them. While i cant test it out, im kind of disappointed that only jpegs and psd files are supported. Im curious as to why there is no support for png. And why change it into bmp format? Why not the same format its already in?

Tested on 60 pictures corrupted in the process of file recovery from a virus corrupted hard drive that lost its master directory FAT Table
It gave me 25 recovered files. Most originals could not be opened, the doctored files could be opened, but only about half of the "doctored" files were restored to an actual image in part or nearly whole ... the rest were restored to image gibberish....bands of pixelated color.
Some of the originals were already openable partial images so the file would open but the picture was damaged, including those bands of color ...and the doctor returned them as "recovered" just as they were with no improvement.

The program was inconsistent in its ability to add more than a single item at a time to the batch list...requiring that the file picker be opened over and over again to build a list.

It stalled on one item, I stopped recovery, and then it failed to recover anything...soon after the interface began losing icons. I restarted the program and it then made some recoveries or recognized partials that before it had marked as bad.

Its hard to tell where it was succeeding ... its possible that some of the original files no longer contain any image data at all, and that the original recovery from the corrupted disk was too full of errors matching content with filenames.

Possibly the files it did recover it "merely" corrected the headers so that they would open as image files.
A test of its abilities would require specific known deliberate damage, bit alterations in the headers, or image scrambling or file scrambling
Seems to me it just makes a file openable and has no way to know if it is image scrambled ... that would probably require an interactive program where you can sort of edit and move blocks around...inserting and deleting elements where everthing shifts to open or close space.

I guess its possible to use a hex editor to examine the file before and after the doctor to see what it has changed to make a file openable again.

13# Strange : your comment is identical to the testimonial of a certain Den Brooks on the main page of SoftOrbits but without spelling mistakes. #9 I do not get any image after clicking on the awards. I would pay even $1000 to recover an important PSD file that has been corrupted but to get a BMP...? No thanks.

Just installed and tried this software. Had a .jpeg file in an email from my brother that had a faint discolouration across the top half of the image. Ran it through the software and ended up with an identical image but in .bmp format.

At this point I would think it doesn't do a lot for me so will be uninstalling shortly.

For those of you who want to see a corrupt image, I uploaded one here...
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/9924/dsc00003e.jpg

I tried it out with the program - had high hopes! It told me it was a bad image, and then the program crashed on me.

As for how images can get corrupt, on Windows XP and prior OS's, whenever you told the computer to defragment, it would occasionally screw up the images.

In any case, I have a whole folder of images like this on a DVD, and this program was not able to recover any of them.

So waste of download, waste of space.

In conclusion after what i read it appear that work only for jpg from SD card.For psd;Advanced Psd Repair have good review and is free.Also folder is portable.So thank for this two softs.I will use it if will be necesarry.

It installed activated and ran fine, but didn't do anything for any of my damaged pics. It's entirely possible that these were just too badly damaged to recover (which I find absolutely hilarious because I can preview them in thumbnail view and they're perfect but will not open and the 'recovery' the program did was purple and green blotches and lines.) I wish it had worked, since some of them are some really cool storm pictures.

I've had digital photos that look okay as thumbnails, but open with a sort of half distorted look with Windows Pic & Fax Viewer. I suppose these are "corrupted". These were photos that were perfectly alright when they were first downloaded from the camera. Don't have them any longer as there seemed to be no way to fix them. Might download this software for the next time it happens.

Just tried it with 3 jpeg images, 2 of which were corrupted and 1 wasn't.

Picture Doctor said all 3 images were 'bad' and couldn't recover any of them, so seems pretty useless.

I had a hard drive crash some time back and had lots of images, both JPG, TIF and PSD formats that were recovered but corrupt. obviously, I had been looking for something like this for several months. But when I realized this one will convert a JPG image as well as a layered PSD into a BMP, I dropped the idea of even giving this software a try. The developer perhaps needs to understand that BMP files are not at all a replacement to PSD.

Price: $99.50 for 1.59 MB !!!!!!

incredible!!!!!

1# Lu Hulu - I had a quick look around the developer's website and gained the impression that this utility is targetting photos & imagess that have been recovered after a hard drive crash or similar. Recovery software often brings back files but they can be in a damaged condition. There are no doubt a number of other ways image files get damaged but many of us may have none in our computers with which to test this software. I think the very high price reflects the value that people put on irreplaceable images that have been lost or damaged.

HOLY COW THIS SOFTWARE WORKS!!! THANK YOU GOATD AND SOFTORBITS!!!

I had some partially-overwritten, deleted JPG files on an SD memory card. I used Recuva to get the files back. I then used today's giveaway to fix the corrupted files. I can't believe it - it actually worked! THANKS!!!

By the way, I'm using Vista Home Premium 64-bit, and the software worked fine - no problems.

For 99.50, I'm not impressed. Having a nurse on your box doesn't suggest professionalism. Similarly, the lack of a demonstrated need puts this program on the "why should I download it" list.

I mean, what does this program do? Is it a file recovery program (but only for pics). If so, what good is recovering them as a BMP? So, it supports PSD files, what good is that if they are recovered as a BMP?!

I had some rescued PSD and JPG images that are corrupted from a memory stick that got locked up. Couldn't access it all, so used a recovery software. Not all the images were ok a lot of them became corrupt and I have been waiting for something to rescue them and enable me to view and work on them. This did not work, failed miserably. The file when opening becomes an invalid file. So what determines the factor of 'Corrupt'? You can't get more corrupt than my recovered images as they have #SCF0098, this then turns it into #SCF0098.bmp. I tried it on several different images and alas no luck.

I wish they had some sample images (before/after recovery) on their homepage so I can get a hint on how this program would help me.