Why are jpeg images becoming corrupt in microSD card after some time?

  • Thread starter Thread starter AC Question
  • Start date Start date
A

AC Question

jpeg images are becoming corrupt in microSD card after some time

I have been using the Samsung MicroSD 64GB Pro in my new HTC E9 Plus mobile phone for around a month now. Recently, I have experienced this annoying data corruption problem with the images I had stored in the SD card. Images captured in my phone are normally stored in the SD card, which I later organize into various folders in the card itself. These appear later as separate albums in the gallery. The problem occurred when, all of a suuden, two of these folders, with some 400 pictures in them, showed about 90% of the images stored in them with the "INVALID" thumbnail against them. I could not open the pictures, either on the phone or on the computer. Also, the metadata files in the image properties are no longer accessible. Despite all this, the size of the images still appears to be the same (about 3MB). Diving deeper into this using HEX editor to decode the corrupted files, I realized that only the JPEG header of these files (which dictate how to rebuild the data into the photo) have been deleted, but not the main bulk of the file thereby retaining the size of the photo. In the ASCII view, metadata such as name of the phone, camera settings are clearly written for normal photos but not the corrupted photos. There are a few other photos which have undergone a lesser degree of damage where some 80% of the photo is blank.

I need help/advice for two things -
1) How do I prevent this from happening in my SD card again? I noticed that it is happening with a few photos all over again. This happens only for photos, other files such as music/videos and other pdfs are all intact. I don't think my card is fake as already warned on the internet beecause the transfer rates come close to the expected values of this card. Should I reformat the whole card? Does the file system of the card matter?

2) How do I recover the damaged photos? All traditional image repair softwares have failed, since the header file is not there to begin with. The only way I can see is to copy/paste the header from a regular photo to this corrupted file. However, the hex editor is not easy to use in identifying the boundary between header and main part of the file. Can you please help me with this?
 
Re: jpeg images are becoming corrupt in microSD card after some time

Welcome to Android Central! First, run SD Insight to see if the card is counterfeit. Counterfeit cards are usually very small capacity cards that get programmed to report that they're much larger. But if you try to save more data to them than they can actually hold, then problems can occur. If the card is counterfeit, then you probably won't be able to retrieve the photos.

If the card isn't counterfeit, unmount it (in Settings>Storage), remove it, and insert it into your computer, then run chkdsk to look for bad sectors: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html.

It's difficult to give advice on how to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, because this could be due to the SD card being defective or counterfeit, or glitchy firmware that has issues with SD access (which we've seen before, more often in Samsung devices). The best advice is to make sure your photos are regularly backed up somewhere, either automatically to Google Photos (using Google Photos Auto Backup), or manually to some other cloud storage or your computer hard drive.