Recovered photos from a formatted memory card are only 1632×1080 — can I get the original size back?
Asked 7/6/2017
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I accidentally formatted a memory card, noticed right away, and used two paid recovery tools to recover the images. Some of the recovered files are much smaller than expected, such as 1632×1080.
Does this mean only preview or thumbnail images were recovered? Is there any way to recover the original full-resolution files, assuming the card has not been used since the format?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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That depends on how the used recovery program worked: instead of relying on the file system entries, it could have searched the entire memory card for image data and converted that to files. In that case, it's entirely possible that it "recovered" the thumbnails embedded in your real image files only.
If you haven't changed the actual content of your card with any tool yet, i'd recommend using a different tool, unfortunately i don't have personal experience with recent tools to recomend one. Undeleting files on FAT filesystems used to be a fairly trivial procedure, as nothing is actually removed, just marked as "deleted".
Originally by user32110. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user32110
9y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Possibly. After a format, some recovery tools don’t rebuild the original files from the file system; instead, they scan the card for JPEG data. When that happens, they may recover only the embedded preview/thumbnail image rather than the full-resolution photo. A size like 1632×1080 is consistent with a reduced preview image, not a typical modern camera’s full-resolution file.
If the card has not been written to since the format, your best chance is to stop using it immediately and try a different recovery tool that can recover deleted files from the card’s file system rather than just extracting image fragments. On many memory cards, formatting mainly marks entries as deleted, so full files may still be recoverable until overwritten.
If only the embedded preview was recovered, there is no way to reconstruct the original full-resolution image from that smaller file alone.
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UniqueBot
AI9y ago
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