@ beergas, DJ Mike in IL, and others

It's true, Giovanni's recommendation of FileRepair is indeed "rubbish". I tried it using the same corrupted samples as used with Picture Doctor. FileRepair said in its result "no recoverable data" on each sample while Picture Doctor successfully recovered a few. Actually the worst part is that FileRepair during installation tried to install 2(TWO) other un-asked-for and undesirable SW which can slip through if u are not very careful. VERY BAD STUFF! Computing life must have been safer if only Giovanni becomes more responsible in his suggestions by testing the software himself BEFORE recommending and at the same time belittling the GOTD offer for the day.

I just recommend remo recover, which is light years better than this one. I have used stellar phoenix, recuva & 7 data recovery. But all of them were least helpful. Remo on the other hand recovered pics, videos, docs and also some files which were long deleted! Take it or leave it.

I have this software (same version) from another website Giveaway.

You have to understand what they mean by "picture doctor".

It may save some photos that were originally fine but somehow became damaged digitally, such that you can no longer view them.

This software cannot save photos that were damaged at source. That is if you mishandled the camera or the camera itself was malfunctioning at the point of taking the photo ---
e.g. when you have a truncated photo which only fills in a fraction of the photo frame.

Then you cannot save it using this software.

Installed without problems on Windows 7 64 bit. I have an old CD with photos that I cannot see, file sizes in the 2 to 3 meg range. I tried a couple of hundred of these with Picture Doctor, and it claimed it recovered all of them but it only recovered one (I think--the result is a half-formed block of something unrecognizable).

I tried using several files at once, one file at a time, over one hundred at once. The program never recovered any photos other than the first one.

Nice try, but I'm going to uninstall it. I'd be fairly displeased if I'd paid $100 dollars for this with the same result, so thank you GAotD for the chance to test drive.

@Giovanni - downloaded FileRepair and started the install, but then it wanted to install Conduit crap. FileRepair may be wonderful but I don't trust anything that wants to install Conduit.

Hi, I put to test 12 pictures which were 'unviewable' (Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because either Photo Viewer doesn't support this file format, or you don't have the latest updates to Picture Viewer) They were all taken, or chosen by me to be send on the same day (date) back in Sept 09 and typically still have 'names' DSCF2134, -35, -37, a.s.o. They seem to be all roughly of similar size - smallest 1.046 MB, largest 1.752 MB.. I have no reason to believe this little collection of Images was thrown in that Folder out of different cameras or being that different in sizes. It was a proper 'set'. I truly don't know how they ended up in that state.

Yet - when recovered with Picture Doctor 2.0 - 7 of them ended up as massive 23.410 MB size, 4 of them ended as 21 KB size and 1 - as only 1KB (that one unviewable) Out of 7 largest Files only 3 (three) seem to be properly recovered, 2 of those are grayed out completely, 1 'pinked out'? 1 blue with heavily jagged top edge. Small ones thumbnail sizes (if that)

Software didn't indicate there was anything 'wrong' with certain pictures. Only that they were all recovered.

Conclusion: ONLY 3 pictures out of 12 ??? If I purchased such expensive Software - it would be on it's way back and I would be asking for cancellation of my order.
Hope Others had better experience with this Software than me.

DJ Mike in IL - how bout you try it yourself and form your own opinion? Or do normally rely on what other people tell you - the government loves citizens like yourself :-)
Giovanni is not your wetnurse...

Hi GAOTD people and visitors
I installed the program with no problems and I decided to test it, but in my "special" method.
I opened a 126 KB jpg photo but in notepad.The picture in notepad consisted of so many horizontal lines numbered from 1 to 862 (!!) each of wich consisted of a series of digits and letters sometimes
very strange letters that propably do not exist in any known language and also sympols for example #, $ and the like.
I started to remove some parts of some lines randomly and save the file (the picture) as such.
Now the picture either becomes black or can not be viewed by any picture veiwer I have altogeter.
Now it is time to test the program. I took the picture I intentedly corrupted to our Doctor here.
I found out that depending on the missing lines, digits or letters I remove (because I repeated my test many times), the recovered picture either becomes just a totally grey image or come back to normal!!
This is fantastic.
It seems that the program scans the digital photo digitally and forms some idea about what it should have been and tries to add as much missing digits, letters and symbols as "HE", the doctor, can.
This is genius, it is like organ transplantation.
A real doctor, even if very talented can not save some hopeless cases, nobody is perfect.
Anyway that we should expect from Russians. They really do love what they do, that's the reason why they do it will (I am not Russian)
Thanks GAOTD, thank you very much.
And to the progrmmer: bulshoi sbaciba!!

Giovanni,

I always appreciate your alternative suggestions. However, the link provided by BeerGas does seem to show a consensus that your suggestion today may not be effective. Have you actually tried the File Repair software? If so, what is your take on it?

@SoftOrbits

Thanks for being honest about ripping off certain area's of the globe!!

I had high hopes for Picture Doctor. I loaded over 100 corrupt JPGs that I had on my computer. It couldn't repair any of them. :(

Uninstalled.

Are there any test corrupted images I can repair to test this program? For almost 10 years, I've never experienced a corrupt image file, ever. I don't get the $99 dollar asking price at all. I did, however download the very tiny Freeware program called File Repair v2.1.0.0 but I can't test it because I lack a corrupt file to test it on.

@beergas - Thanks for the link. I usually take Giovanni's recommendations as Gospel but, I too have serious doubts that FileRepair can possibly do what it claims. A tiny 1MB program that can repair all of these file formats? I seriously doubt it.:

•corrupted Word documents (.doc, .docx, .docm, .rtf)
•corrupted Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xla, .xlsx)
•corrupted Zip or RAR archives (.zip, .rar)
•corrupted videos (.avi, .mp4, .mov, .flv, .wmv, .asf, .mpg)
•corrupted JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG or RAW images (.jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .bmp, .png)
•corrupted PDF documents (.pdf)
•corrupted Access databases (.mdb, .mde, .accdb, .accde)
•corrupted PowerPoint presentations (.ppt, .pps, .pptx)
•corrupted music (.mp3, .wav)

SoftOrbits develops some pretty solid products. So, although I have not tested Picture Doctor 2.0, I am going to install and save it for "a rainy day".

Thanks GOTD and SoftOrbits.

I left an unpopular comment about a company's responsibility to make sure the spelling on their site is proper and correct for the foreign country in which they conduct business.

This comment may also be unpopular. It seems any company should also take on the responsibility of making sure the pricing is correct for each country and region in which the product is marketed.

Why would the price be so much lower/higher in some areas? When seeing the $29.99 price, then realizing you must pay 300% more because of where you live, it feels like being taken advantage of.

It's irrelevant today, since it is free. It also seems to be one of the best image recovery tools I've encountered.

I bet, if the pricing issue gets cleaned up, no one would ever have a problem paying the inflated asking price (which only seems inflated because I already know it's offered at a much lower price in some areas).

I might give File Repair a shot but 6 of 6 comments here say it is "rubbish". Don't know.
http://file-repair1.software.informer.com/comments/

I give this a thumbs up and I haven't even tried it yet. Why because if it repairs even one file its worth the FREE price we are paying.
I dont need it at this time butyou can be sure I'll save it just in case.

What about to repair html files? what program does this?
thanks to answer.

Installed but works hardly for a 2% size of 1% photos (That is 1 photo in 100 corrupt files)

I tried this on ten JPEG files. It worked on none of them, and the last two froze my computer so that even Task Manager was useless and I had to restart. Doubly disappointing because SoftOrbits has some good software that I use regulary, but this is rubbish. Uninstalled.

Even if it did work properly, asking $100 for a program with such limited use is insanity.

Does what it claims but.....

...using File Repair, you can repair:

corrupted Word documents (.doc, .docx, .docm, .rtf)
corrupted Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xla, .xlsx)
corrupted Zip or RAR archives (.zip, .rar)
corrupted videos (.avi, .mp4, .mov, .flv, .wmv, .asf, .mpg)
corrupted JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG or RAW images (.jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .bmp, .png)
corrupted PDF documents (.pdf)
corrupted Access databases (.mdb, .mde, .accdb, .accde)
corrupted PowerPoint presentations (.ppt, .pps, .pptx)
corrupted music (.mp3, .wav)

FREE!

http://www.filerepair1.com

^_^

Please note that we have special pricing policy for some countries. $99 price is valid for USA/UK/Europe/Australia and some other countries. We have special discounts for some regions in Asia, Africa, South America, etc.

As per their website, even a business licence costs 29.99 and not 99.99

see here
http://www.softorbits.com/picdoctor/order.html

@1 ASBY

Cited from only comment on
http://www.softorbits.com/picdoctor/index.html
"I had some partially-overwritten, deleted JPG files on an SD memory card. I used Recuva to get the files back. I then used Picture Doctor to fix the corrupted files. I can’t believe it – jpeg repair actually worked! THANKS!!!
By the way, I’m using Vista Home Premium 64-bit, and the software worked fine – no problems."

That's how you could test it. I hope some independent people will post results.

From http://www.softorbits.com/allnews.html
"November 11, 2012 Picture Doctor 2.0 released! "

I dislike sites requiring javascript for known reasons. Therefore direct download link to get the 2 MB trial
http://download.softorbits.com/files/pdsetup.exe

Worked on 2 out of 4 damaged jpeg images I tried it with. Nothing else has ever been able to recover these images for me.

I should add that there are virtually no options...You can chose the output directory and that's it. All files are saved as bmp (at least the jpg ones I tried).

Again it's very fast.

Installed easily on Win XP Sp3. An email was required to register. I installed this cause I have some corrupted jpg's I have been trying to recover to no avail. Other recent GOTD offers have failed to work for these files so I thought I'd give this one a shot. I loaded the 9 corrupted jpg files and hit go. It was very fast and told me that all 9 had been recovered. I looked into the recovery directory and saw that 9 files had been written. All of them were bmp files and 8 had file size of 1k. Those 8 were all blank. BUT 1 file was recovered to 14MB (original was 489k) and it opened and low and behold the photo was recovered. I tried again on the other 8 but same results and 1st time. All wrote as 1kb file and app says they are all recovered successfully. I give this a thumbs up just cause it managed to recover 1 file that many apps I tried all failed on. 1 is better than none when it comes to recovery.

Installed and registered on a Win 8.1 Pro 64 bit system

A Russian company with an address.

A small and non resizable window opens. You can select your damaged files and the program tries to recover as much as possible. This works of course in same cases and in other cases not.

I have uploaded two pictures, the original and the "damaged", where I deleted via patching some informations. You can test the and see the result yourself.

This is another use of their revovery software. Why not...

Works as it claims, with the known restriction, that deleted or overwritten image data cannot be recovered, not by this program nor by others.

http://karlxx.imgur.com/all/

Maybe usefull for a damaged SD card, without backup and the only existing wedding pictures...

The program repairs damaged images. I am not sure how to test it.I do not know a way to intentionally damage a picture and then try to recover it. It may not be for a everyday user and aimed at photo professionals.