Awesome

Installation

To install recoverjpeg, run

./configure
make
sudo make install

To use sort-pictures, you need to install:

• exif: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libexif
• ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/

Usage

Look at the manual pages for recoverjpeg(1), recovermov(1) and sort-pictures(1).

What to do if the medium is physically damaged?

Mike Ingle wrote about working with a drive that cannot be read because of errors:

The hard drive was more complicated because recoverjpeg would abort on the first bad sector it hit. I tried using a named pipe and that did not work, so I did:

dd if=/dev/sdc of=recovery-image bs=65536 conv=noerror

and that made an image file while skipping over the bad blocks without aborting. Then I would end up with a 500 GByte file which I ran recoverjpeg on, and it worked.

Another option suggested by Florian Schmaus is to use the dedicated ddrescue which may cope with even more desperate situations where multiple passes are needed in order to recover the physical medium content.

History

recoverjpeg was written on 23 December 2004 after a huge mistake: a disk containing pictures was repartitioned and a new operating system was installed on top. recoverjpeg and sort-pictures ran on this 80GB disk and rescued 19222 pictures (11GB):

• 9538 pictures sorted by date (a few of them were corrupted in a way that no software can detect as they are valid JFIF files) and taken on 337 different days

• 1310 JFIF files without date (some of them were correct pictures whose exif data had been corrupted)

• 8301 JFIF files too small to be digital pictures (no error there, most of them were thumbnails of real pictures previously made by software such as gqview)

• 71 invalid JFIF files

• 4 pictures recorded at a date of 0000-00-00 (probably a bug in the camera used to take the pictures)

Of course, I had a backup of everything, but I cannot seem to remember where I put it.

On January 2010, Jan Funke added the recovermov(1) program to the package to recover lost movies.

On April 2012, Samuel Tardieu added the -d option to recoverjpeg(1) to circumvent arbitrary limits set on the number of files per directory on certain limited filesystems. Also, support of compilation with clang(1) was added.

Portability

You need to ensure that the off_t type from the C library and the lseek() function support offsets of at least the size of the device you want to recover pictures from.

Contact information

Home page: https://rfc1149.net/devel/recoverjpeg

Authors:

• Jan Funke
• Samuel Tardieu

Development

If you got this software using your revision control tool, you can build the autogenerated files by using:

autoreconf --install

Thanks

The following beta-testers and contributors are warmly thanked:

• Olivier Beyssac ob@r14.freenix.org
• Pierre Beyssac pb@eu.org
• Bertrand Petit elrond@phoe.frmug.org
• Dunc dunc@lemonia.org