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

Either the data isn't there, or the JPEG bitstream is interrupted by invalid data: Often a byte combination that gets interpreted as a "JPEG marker".

1. File was cut / truncated, to diagnose compare with other file sizes from same camera / session, if file is half gray and is only half size of comparable intact file then file is simply truncated.

2. File is good size but half filled with zeros. You can check using a hex editor like HxD or HexWalk or use sometimes of graphical byte-map tool

3. Using a hex editor or graphical byte-map we determine file size is valid and entire file contains data. Not only that, a specialized tool shows the data is actually JPEG data throughout the file and even removed offending bytes from the JPEG data:

And we can then even try minimize the effect of the distorted RAW data on the image:

Answer 4

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 5

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.