Joep, My apologies for not composing easily readable text for non native English speakers I am Dyslexic and have a significant short term memory deficit due to oxygen starvation when I was a child which makes written text composition even more difficult.

I completely understand that you cannot tell without examining the images and neither can I as there is no observable difference in character composition when viewing the possibly truncated images in a hex editor.

I did find it difficult to try different options in the patch tool pane as it too often became inaccessible or unresponsive to mouse pointer activity for no apparent reason... I could not discern what makes it active and what makes the pane inactive so did not try every conceivable patch option or feature as I would have done normally. I found it often just produced a small 8K stub of a file that obviously was not a valid JPG.

A simple "fix" where the tail end JPEG data is truncated or overwritten with other non-JPEG data could be to add a crop tool to crop off the grey'd out padding and losslessly generate a JPEG out of the selected data area and include the original Exif if not completely replacing a corrupted header.

Technically I can load such images in say Irfanview or PhotoShop and crop the images and save them out as a new JPG file but that is a lossy process as it involves recompressing the cropped raster image again with the lossy JPEG algorithm...

Your tool understanding the JPEG data stream could be made to simply crop snapping to the JPEG cells and losslessly transcode the data into a new dimension JPG image.

Joep, i guess my last comment about have the problem fixed didnt post....sorry.

Ken, try right clicking on the file setup.exe and selecting properties and then changing the blocked setting to unblocked or do that on the zip file before extracting the contents to a seperate folder,
then renaming the setup.exe to JPGRepair.exe so windows and windows defender don't confuse the program with an installer and apply different security template to it.

topgum, try right clicking on the file setup.exe and selecting properties and then changing the blocked setting to unblocked,
then renaming the setup.exe to JPGRepair.exe so windows and windows defender don't confuse the program with an installer and apply different security template to it.

Joep, when I saw Ivan's comment I lol'd at the "bizarre" comment too. Then I installed it and, Ivan is right, it is *really* hard on the eyes to the point of being practically illegible. Your participation here is extremely welcome and I can see that you take feedback into account, so I wanted to share that with you. Thanks for the giveaway and for being one of the good ones who follow up. :-)

Joep, I'm on a brand new Win 10 pro machine, also running at 1366x786, default (100%) scaling. Honestly I think 75% of the problem is the boxy font and its tracking and (lack of?) kerning. On my screen, the words in the status bar (width, height etc.) are virtually the only words that are crisp and very legible. The squared off letters everywhere else are hard to process visually. Combine that with the lower case drive letters and the weird square brackets with the double lines and it's just hard to move past that top left corner, where most people's eyes go first. The effect is intensified by the *image* of that same corner that appears in the instructions in the main screen, and by the white on black instructions, a colour combo that requires crisp text. Thanks for asking. HTH because clearly you have a winner with the functionality!

Joep, you are most welcome. I almost didn't reply - not everyone takes kindly to that kind of detailed feedback. I'm glad I did and that you found it helpful. :-)

Joep, I have the same problem with the size. My screen resolution is: 1366 x 768 - it is set at 120%

Joep,
My screen resolution is 1024 x 768 and I can reach the right side its right side. The problem is with the program window which size can't be changed, so the right side can't be seen even if I move the window, and its edges remain on the beginning of the options with the most part hidden.

Joep,
Thanks a lot for your assistance and best wishes of success to you.

dana, I suspect your problem is caused by your custom high DPI scaling setting of 120% which makes the effective resolution alot less than 1366 x768 either try reducing scaling to 100% or adjusting the compatability settings in the right click properties Compatability tab for this program... I can't give you specific settings you will need to use but I suspect you can find a setting that will work by disabling scaling for this program only. I believe at 120% scaling you'd need a screen resolution of 1640 x 922 to see the entire window of this program!

TK, just tried setting my systems high DPI scaling to 200% on 1920x1080 and no combination of program compatability settings allowed this program to override the systems high DPI scaling so it always exceeded the zoomed desktop size. Only solution with non-high DPI aware programs with a fixed size window that is equal or slightly less than the screen resolution is to reduce the High DPI scaling until the window fits inside the display area. I returned mine back to 100% as everything works better that way.

Joep,
Thanks a lot, I downloaded the new version and activated it, and it works now!
Good work, congratulations and best wishes of success.

Joep, I will try to send a couple shortly. Thank you for looking into this.

M. H.,

"... but it's been ages since I had a damaged JPEG."

Yeah, I've been playing with graphics/images since before win 3.1, and can't really recall ever encountering one. Maybe we're lucky?

OTOH the app is tiny, & file recovery software can sometimes only bring back part of a file, so why not? Hopefully today is the only time I ever run the app, but who knows?

mike, I totally agree with you *fingerscrossed*. :-)

JimK, I get the impression this developer is not a "young" developer in as much as they are coding in native CPU language and not some pseudo compiled language like VB# or C# or Java etc and are not using some highly bloated 3rd party libraries to make a pretty GUI with megabytes of redundant code and data linked in.
The neater and tighter you code especially if you are coding in x86 assmebly language the less likely you are going to throw man hours developing a streamlined but visually exciting GUI... for less than a megabyte in program and data size it looks just fine to me. Not having any corrupted JPGs I wanted to repair that I had not already repaired sufficiently by other means I cannot vouch for its utility in that respect but since JPEG headers and data can get corrupted in so many different ways and the actual JPG data may not even exist within a JPG file to repair in the first place that you failing to get a single JPG repaired is not a damning indictment as this program is a tool not a garanteed 100% or your money back fix all broken files with JPG as file extension!

Joep, It's called a 'ping' . It's for stat purposes only & does not effect running or security of program & is not used for gathering data from the user.

Joep, why not giving the end-user the option to opt-in or out for that instead of having it enabled hardcoded? Not everyone wants to give away that information at all by default or participate in data collection like this.

Trying 2 b Helpful, that internet connection is an http request to google analyictics counting the number of times the program is run! It is unannounced data harvesting.

POST /collect HTTP/1.1
Content-Length: 145
Accept: */*
Content-Type: text/plain; Charset=UTF-8
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Win32; WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5)
Host: www.google-analytics.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

v=1&tid=UA-79984448-1&cid=cda14371-d421-4311-b9dc-dd62002b47f1&an=jpgrepair&av=1.8.44&t=pageview&dl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.disktuna.com%2Fcountme.html


Also by default windows treats files with the word Setup in the file name as if they are installers so automatically demand elvated admin rights which are normally required for an installer... This file called setup.exe IS NOT an installer so should be renamed I suggest using the name JPGRepairToolkit1883-uc23wx.exe to tie it with this specific giveaway. Doing so will allow it to run as a user mode program and not an elevated installer. The developer needs to make this sneaky telemetary a procedure we have to optin to and not which is done on the quiet and in the case of the version they gave to GAOTD for this giveaway it must not be mandatory so the program fails to run if the internet is not made available to it!

If the developer produces a CLEAN executable that does not sneak out usage stats and refuse to operate unless it can it may be a a handy portable tool but as it is even if it allows operation offline but still tries to sneak usage statistics when it finds itself on an internet conected computer it is NOT the sort of program I want on any system of mine and I would not recommend it to anyone who cannot block outgoing internet connections from individual programs.
To the developer if you want usage statistics let the end user know explicitly that you want to gather them and assume the majority will prefer to not having their activity tracked so default to opt out! Demanding it without notification and without consent is unacceptable no matter how compact your program or potentially useful your program may be.

Joep, the version I just downloaded from your site did not FIX the undesirable design feature it still insists on making the unanounced google-analytics requests but this time apparently twice and produces a significant startup delay if it cannot get internet access to phone google and let them know all about the users use of your program in having google then touch your server for the transparent GIF you use to track users without our explicit consent. No doubt you can log into your account on google-analytics and gain various additional statistics.

Also included in that jpgrepair1892.zip archive is the executable "PhotoHeal.exe" why is that included in the ZIP file? also for your information on execution of PhotoHeal.exe it throws up an error alert "Unexpected Error"!

Joep, as bob noted, this URL has "jpgrepair1892.zip" and not the 1.9.2 version. BTW, you are the most responsive vendor I've seen on GOTD. Kudos...

Joep, I went here.


https://www.disktuna.com/sdm_downloads/jpg-repair/

Terry e, It's not that odd for us to be offered a version number higher than distributed via a contributers website publically it can happen for a couple of reasons. The main reason is we sometimes get used as unanounced free beta testing service by the contributor and they hope for us to reveal bugs in their upcoming beta/release and GAOTD is used because they do not have a fan base that is willing to act as willing beta testers and do not have professional in house alpha/beta testers and the other reason I can think of is the giveaway is a special build with a different licensing mechanisim or pre-activated and as such is not the identical version normally distributed by the contributer. This has happend in the past but is much more rare.

Jim Collins, Run setup.exe to run program.
On first run there is a box to enter the reg code.
It stores it in the same folder as setup.exe.
Run setup.exe again and it goes to the program screen.
Can create a desktop shortcut if you like.

I have the same problem Windows 10 64 Bit Run setup and program is there it just runs. But no setup at all no place for the Registration key they sent in the text file. Look to me like they need to do some work on this and maybe repost in a few days after they get it fixed.

Jim Collins, extract the contents of the downloaded zip file to a seperate folder and read the readme.txt file, then rename the Setup.exe file to JPGRepair.exe then execute it ... if it throws an error it is still the old broken build the developer gave GAOTD in error hopefully the devloper will pass on a fixed version without the google telemetary bundled into it before the giveaway is over..
The program is a "portable" program it does NOT install into a system. Once you have input the license key it will create a licnese key named .key file to signal to the program it is registered.

I'm going to answer my own question. Setup.exe extracts the program as a temporary file and runs it, expecting it to be an .exe setup file. However it is just a program, not an installer, so the temporary .exe runs as the program. Nothing is installed. Presumably tomorrow setup.exe won't run and you'll only have access to the program if you copied it out of the temporary folder and renamed it. Although the licence does seem to work on the version from the website.

Joep, Thanks, now I just need a corrupted JPEG where the corruption isn't the bottom third of the data is missing :-)
Good luck with your software.

Joep, Please don't think I was being negative, I was just saying I couldn't immediately find a file to feed it...