JPEG Repair Toolkit

Photos left forgotten in a folder may get corrupted in time, and it would be a real shame if you lose the pictures you've taken in a far-away country. If you encounter corrupted images on your computer, you could try to fix them with JPEG Repair Toolkit. Though it's not guaranteed to work, it does give you a chance to salvage those pictures you don't want to lose forever.

The software is free to try with some minor limitations. It comes as a single executable in a ZIP archive, which contains a secondary photo repair tool as well. Furthermore, you don't have to meet any special requirements, and you won't notice any impact on your computer's performance.

JPEG Repair Toolkit's user interface has a fairly simple layout, making it quite easy to attempt to repair photos. The application supports three repair modes, starting from hard repairs, through which the program tries to repairs image files that can't even be opened. You will need a reference file if you opt for this method, as well as some luck. Another repair method you can pick is JPEG extraction, to recover embedded pictures from RAW files. Finally, you can also patch images, if it's distorted due to a shift in image data.

There's not much you have to do yourself. Just pick a repair method, select a picture and click a button. Additionally, you can set the program to override the picture's dimensions and set new ones, ignore the EOI marker, and set a minimum resolution. The application will automatically save the repaired or recovered photo, in the same location as the original file, so you don't have to spend any time looking through your folders.

JPEG Repair Toolkit gives you one more thing you can try out before you decide to delete corrupted photos.