JPEG Medic // Accurate Manual JPEG Recovery

JpegMedic - Repair Damaged JPEG Images Like a Pro

You don’t have to be a computer geek to recover damaged JPEG files, because you can rely on JpegMedic now. JpegMedic is a professional yet really easy to use software to repair damaged JPEG files. No special skills or knowledge is required!

Even though JPEG images have quite complex internal structure, the JpegMedic program turns this complexity into an easy to grasp visual form and allows manipulating JPEG images easily thanks to the straightforward user interface. With JpegMedic, you work with fragments of a JPEG image the same way you build a figure from Lego blocks. All you need to do to repair a broken JPEG photograph is to put those blocks in the correct order.

There are multiple reasons causing damages to your files including hardware malfunction of the hard disk of your computer or the SD-card of your camera, virus attacks, and encryption by ransomware. And damages done to your files can be different too: from slight corruption of several bytes to complete data loss. That is why JpegMedic does not guarantee 100% "magical" recovery of all your files. But if damaged JPEG images contain at least some graphical information, JpegMedic is just the right tool to recover it.

What damages JpegMedic can repair?

A JPEG file consists of two parts. The first part is metadata that contains service tables and information needed to decode the image. The second part contains the graphical data itself. Even though any part of a JPEG image could be damaged, you can easily detect which one of two is damaged visually.

When the graphical part is damaged, you can instantly see it. In this case, JPEG viewers correctly display the beginning of the image, but starting from some point the image doesn’t look good. You can see it has wrong colors or unaligned parts, or a large portion of the image may not show at all due to decoding error.

In fact, repairing such damages is not too hard. The only minor problem is that some part of the image is lost in the damaged fragment of the file, but this can be solved by inserting the corresponding fragment from the thumbnail image or by using auto-generated content – a feature widely present in many contemporary graphical editors. Simply take a look at this demo video to see how easily you can repair your damaged photographs!

If the service tables are damaged, the image viewers cannot decode JPEG at all and hence cannot display even the beginning part of the image, because the information required to decode it was located in the damaged part of the JPEG file. Typically, you will see an error message then:

This can happen if the system is infected by viruses that encrypt user files. But even this problem can be solved. JpegMedic can merge the metadata from a healthy well-readable JPEG file and the graphical information from the damaged one. The resulting combined file is a 100% correct JPEG image you can open in viewers and editors.

What else JpegMedic can?

JpegMedic knows everything about the structure of graphical data in a JPEG image, and it also knows very well how metadata are written to the file by modern cameras. Importantly, metadata contain thumbnails of images. Historically, such thumbnails had rather low resolution and were stored in JFIF and EXIF segments, but contemporary digital cameras can store quite large thumbnails like 1440x960 pixels, and often do this in their own format, different to each manufacturer. JpegMedic knows about 20 different ways cameras use to save thumbnails in metadata and can extract them automatically. So, even if the main image is damaged, a survived thumbnail of a decent resolution can save the day.

Not only can JpegMedic work with individual JPEG files, it also can work with arbitrary files containing JPEG images inside, and finds such JPEG images by signatures. For example, RAW files created by modern cameras can store multiple copies of the image in the JPEG format, not only as a small thumbnail, but also as a full-sized image. So, if the original RAW file is damaged, such embedded JPEG images can be extracted using JpegMedic and even repaired right off the bat if they are damaged too.

One more important feature of JpegMedic is its ability to work with disk images. If, for example, the SD-card of your digital camera failed, you can create a disk image of that SD-card (and we recommend you doing this), and try to repair data using this disk image instead of the card itself. This way you reduce chances that an unfortunate change on the SD-card will render the rest of the vital data completely unreadable.

JpegMedic supports FAT12/FAT16/FAT32/exFAT/ISO file systems. This allows the program to precisely detect the position of files on the disk image.

When the file system of an SD-card is damaged, you may end up with JPEG images found during signature search look damaged. One of possible reasons for that is file system fragmentation. A file is not always written to the storage in a sequential order, sometimes it can be split onto several blocks each written to a different place on the storage. JpegMedic has a tool for such a situation too. You can manually select clusters containing the file being repaired, and therefore recover the original file byte-to-byte.

And if you are a forensic expert and are accustomed to specialized disk image formats, such as AFF, E01 or Ex01, JpegMedic can be extremely helpful for you. JpegMedic can work with such disk images as naturally as with normal disk images.

You can learn more about JpegMedic from the online knowledge base that describes all steps to repair a damaged JPEG file in all details.

System requirements
  • Windows 64 bit
  • 2 GB RAM
Version info
  • File size: 14 MB
  • File date: 10 Jun 2022