Photos recovered but half of them are unreadable or glitchy

So I recovered a bunch of old photos from my external drive after accidentally deleting them. Recovery finished fine, file sizes look normal, but now a lot of images won’t open or show weird blocks. Some open once, then break again. Did I screw something up during recovery or are these files just gone?

Photo

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Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

Ezra Flint

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 10:16 am

Also stop opening them repeatedly in Photos app. Windows Photos sometimes worsens corruption by rewriting metadata.

Mira Lennox Lennox

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 10:14 am

Then those aren’t totally dead. Standard recovery tools won’t fix broken image structure though. You’d need proper photo repair software that rebuilds headers using reference images.

Jack

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 10:05 am

Checked a few. Some are zeroes, but others have readable headers and random data after that.

Silas Vane

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 10:03 am

Quick check: open one of the bad images in a hex editor. If it’s mostly zeroes, nothing can fix that. If there’s structured data, repair might still work.

Nina Calder

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 9:54 am

That flickering between fine and corrupted usually means partial data is there. Viewer reads cached preview, then hits bad blocks when decoding full image.

Jack

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 9:47 am

Yeah it’s an SSD actually. That’s what worries me. But some files do open sometimes, which is confusing.

Jace Elric

Participant

December 29, 2025 at 9:44 am

If it’s an SSD or newer drive, there’s a good chance TRIM already wiped parts of the data. Recovery tools can rebuild filenames but not missing content.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)