Photos – one glance and an ocean of memories flows past our eyes. They are precious, and hold a close spot near our hearts, right? Imagine one or many such images becoming corrupt. The very thought might have run jitters down your spine even if you are not an avid photographer. You might be thinking – Is there any way I can prevent image corruption? Because let’s face it, it’s good to be prepared in the event one such situation arises.
When Can Image Corruption Take Place?
If you are in a soup, needn’t beat yourself up because image corruption can happen even to the noblest soul on Earth. But, it’s important to have a look at some common scenarios when your images might get damaged –
- While Shooting Images – Let’s say a technical snag hit your camera or SD card, the result? Images became corrupted.
- File System Issues – Your image’s file system may have become corrupt while saving especially in an event of an unexpected crash.
- Images Became Corrupt While Sharing Or Transferring – We don’t keep photos to ourselves, do we? We share it with friends, family, and colleagues. Quite likely your photos became corrupt when the transfer got interrupted.
- Bad sectors on your storage device – HDDs (internal and external) develop bad sectors over a while. And, in case your images are on one such hard disk, they may get corrupted.
- Incompatible format – It could be that your photos are in a file format that the destination device can’t read.
Needn’t Lose Hope – Here Are Ways To Fight Image Corruption
Most of the steps mentioned below are rather preventive measures.
However, amongst these, you’ll also find ways in which you can repair corrupt images as well. So, read on –
1. Ensure a Constant Power Supply
If you know that the image you are working on will take longer to process, you should ensure a constant power supply.
The image on your computer can easily get corrupted if there is a sudden shutdown. To ensure that this does not happen, keep your laptop charged especially if you know that you will be editing photos while traveling or in a situation where a constant power supply is non-negotiable.
You can also keep a UPS handy, in case you use a desktop and live in an area where long outages are quite common.
2. Backup Is Important
Backup is one thing that many of us neglect, it could be out of laziness or any other reason. Trust us, you would thank your backup in the event your images are corrupt beyond repair. You’d be breathing a sigh of relief that you at least have a backup from where you can get back the right images again.
Now, that you are convinced of how important a backup is, we’d further recommend creating multiple backups. This way, even if one backup is not working out, you’ll have another backup ready to save your life.
Wondering where to start with your photo backup journey? This post will help you get started.
3. Let The Photo Editing Software You Are Using Complete Tasks
Sometimes certain tasks may take some time to process. For instance, if you are working with multiple layers on Photoshops, certain filters or applying masks may take some time to apply. The same goes when you are working with vector images.
During that time, it is advisable to keep calm and let the process complete before you move on to the next task or even close your photo editing software. That’s because, if you abruptly or forcefully try to close the existing tasks using shortcuts or other methods, your image may become corrupted.
4. Install A Third-Party Image Repair Software
No matter ‘how’ or ‘when’ the image corruption took place, an image repair software gives you hope that regardless of the situation, you can repair the corrupted image.
A photo repair software like Stellar Repair for Photo is capable of fixing various photo corruption issues such as pixelated images, images that have corrupt header/ data, fuzzy photos, and many others. It can deal with all image corruption situations, at times, even if photos are corrupt beyond repair.
How To Repair Corrupt Images Using Stellar Repair for Photo?
Here’s a demonstration of how this image repair tool can help you fix corrupt images –
1. Download, install and run Stellar Repair for Photo.
2. Click on Add File and add images that you want to repair.
3. Select the images that you want to repair and then click on the Repair button.
4. Preview repaired files and save them to the desired location.
5. Have A Photo Recovery Tool By Your Side
Whether you are a seasoned photographer or someone who regularly keeps the gallery full of memories, you should be prepared for the worst situations. What if you are left with no option but to delete images? A photo recovery tool keeps you up in the fight against image corruption, especially, if you are in one such situation.
Take the example of Photos Recovery which is regarded as one of the best recovery tools. It can help you recover photos, videos, and even audio files not just from your internal hard drives but even from other devices regardless of the data loss condition. If you want to know more about this tool, this review will give you complete insight.
How To Use Photos Recovery To Retrieve Deleted Images?
1. Download, install and run Photos Recovery.
2. Select the drive from where you want to recover images.
3. Click on Deep Scan to perform a more detailed sector-wide scanning.
4. When the scan is complete, you will find all your deleted images. Select the one that you want to recover.
5. Click on Recover and save the image to the desired location on your computer.
Note: Please save the image at a location other than the original one as saving it at the original location may risk overwriting and you may lose the image forever.
How Would You Fight Image Corruption?
While the above are some great techniques to save images from getting corrupted, we’d also like to know if you have a tactic that we did not mention. For more such content, keep reading “WeTheGeek”.