recovered .jpegs

[yaro]

I managed to recover a lot of data from my failing hard drive and most of it looks OK except for pictures. Although the file size looks fine and I'm getting the preview, when I open a picture I can see it only in the preview size so very small and blurred. I think I had this problem before when recovering pictures but never came up with a solution to this problem.
yaro

[GDH]

Hi,

What was the size of the original files?

In a JPEG there are actually two photos, a small one up the front (used for the thumbnail preview) followed by the larger full size photos.

It is possible, if they are large files, that the full size was not being recovered.

Let me know the original size, and also try opening the files with IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide to see if you can see any of the full size image.

[yaro]

I'm not sure what was the original size of the photos but the .jpgs I managed to recover are around 100kb which sounds right for this type of images. Also it would be rather peculiar if other file types were recovered all right and it's only .jpgs that have problems. Unless the software doesn't work well with .jpg files or if only the part of a jpg file that's used for preview uses .jpg extension.
Thanks
yaro

[GDH]

100k for a JPEG file is quite small.

JPEGs are one of the easiest file types to recover as they have a very distinct file structiure.

The preview is done by header recognition.

[yaro]

Would it be possible that they were recovered with a different file extension as during the recovery I lost all the folder structure and file names and I just filtered for JPEGs afterwards. Thanks
yaro

[GDH]

Not really, as those files with a JPEG header get put in the JPEG section.