JPEG Medic // Accurate Manual JPEG Recovery
Table of Contents
  1. Overview
  2. Theory of JPEG Repair
    1. JPEG structure
    2. How to fix broken JPEG file
  3. Working with the Program
    1. Main menu
    2. Virtual folder tree
    3. Files panel
    4. Preview panel
    5. Cluster view
    6. Hex view
  4. Repairing JPEG image
    1. Opening JPEG file
    2. Repair window
      1. Menu commands
    3. Repair procedure
      1. Visual analysis and localization of damaged MCUs
      2. Finding the next correct MCU
      3. Deleting damaged MCUs
      4. Inserting empty MCUs
      5. Color correction
        1. Automatic color correction
        2. Manual color correction
      6. Filling empty MCUs with data
        1. Use the thumbnail image to fill the empty MCUs
        2. Auto-generate missing content
    4. Saving repaired JPEG image
    5. Repairing fragmented JPEG file
    6. Repairing damaged JPEG image based on SOS marker
    7. Repairing JPEG file encoded by ransomware

Repairing damaged JPEG image based on SOS marker

Often the damaged image has its metadata and service tables damaged as well. This makes it impossible to correctly determine the beginning of the JPEG image. However, in this case there is a way to locate the beginning of the image using the Start of Scan (SOS) segment. While this method may give "false positives" sometimes, it still works in many other situations.

The Start of Scan segment immediately precedes the encoded graphical data, but does not contain much information about the image itself. So the program simply does what it can do: it automatically produces a number of combinations of available metadata and graphical information, and then allows the user to select the most appropriate variant.

JPEG SOS marker

The program takes metadata from those JPEG files that were found during the scan of the loaded file or the disk image. If you know for sure what camera was used to make the image, you can manually add more variants of metadata by using the File > Open metadata sample and open a correct JPEG image made with the same camera.

Aside from that, repairing such an image is not different from repairing the image with fully available metadata.

IMPORTANT! Images in the SOS folder and all the subfolders are not present in other folders including All, Size, Camera, and Date.