Why are the bottom half of my images gray?

Question

My brother in law took some pictures for me of my daughter after she was born.

When I open up the pictures or look at the previews, they all look like this (with the bottom half gray):

At first I thought that the images were just corrupted, but after playing around with them I noticed something odd.

If I right click on the image and select rotate clockwise (or counter clockwise), I can see the whole image for a second. Like this:

But after a second the thumbnail looks like this:

If it can access the full image for a second, is there a chance I can get the full image restored? Or somehow save it off? (These pictures are non-recoverable otherwise.)

Answer 1

These are most likely JPEG images. I have seen this in rare cases when the image was not fully copied over and left corrupted.

Check out this article to see if it will help you fix/understand what's going on.

http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/fix-corrupt-jpeg-photo.html

Answer 2

Something about copying it from the phone to the pc caused this for me. When I emailed the photos to myself solved the issue.

Answer 3

While kobaltz has the reason down, they didn't specify a source of the problem. Assuming your photos were taken with a digital camera recording on to removable media (SD card, CF card, etc), this photo corruption is caused by a failing or faulty storage media.

I've experienced this on a low end SD card where the image would look normal while Windows Photo Viewer rendered the image, but as soon as it finished, instead of grey space, there were colours and distortion all over the image.

Sadly, from what I know, you can't really fix this, as the images were saved incorrectly. I'm certain that with a bit of Google-fu, though, you could find something that could perhaps salvage some of your images.

Answer 4

If you have an image editing software like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, try opening the file in that and make a minor adjustment (nothing that will change the picture drastically). Then SAVE AS the photo back to the same location, overwriting the original file. In many cases, it will properly write the data that was missing from the original corrupt file. I had to do this with about 50 photos when I had a bad segment on my camera's SD card.

Also - make sure you reformat the card in your camera as it sounds like you have a problem with your SD card.

Answer 5

A single flipped bit in JPEG data can do that.

In JPEG bit stream FF 00 is valid and the decoder will know what to do with it. In bits this is 1111111100000000. Let's flip the last bit so we have 1111111100000001. In HEX this is FF 01. Most decoders will try interpret this as a JPEG marker, however there is no corresponding JPEG marker. As a result the decoder stops decoding, maybe reporting an invalid JPEG marker. From that point on the image will be grey or another color solid block.

JPEGSnoop will also mention the invalid marker + the byte address. Using a binary editor you could try changing FF 01 to FF 00. In my experience though it's seldom just one bit that flipped but a group of bytes.

It can often be repaired, I created a tool for that called JPG-Repair Toolkit.