Hi all,
I was downloading some NEF files in to Lightroom and I thought everything was fine. When I went back to edit the images I needed for a job, I ended up having nothing. I have no idea what happened and I had already deleted them from my SD card. So I tried to recover the pictures from the card using Stellar Phoenix PhotoRecovery. Long story short, I managed to recover the files I needed by checking the date I shot them, but they seem to be corrupt. So I tried to see if I had any luck with ExifTool, and tried to convert the NEF files to jpg, but I got the "File format error" issue.
I was about to give up on them, except I noticed that when I tried to open the NEF files in a photo editing software, (lets say Photoshop, as you'll see below), I can see that there are images there that I believe are the files that I want (and that have >10mb). But when I close the software and open the folder in Finder, only the <100kb photos are there. I'm incredibly confused.
(http://imageshack.com/a/img540/8895/GM73Y9.png)
(http://imageshack.com/a/img901/7986/0JDeQc.png)
In the meanwhile, yesterday I tried to check if the images in the SD card still appeared when I scanned it with the Stellar Recover software and they did. So I managed to recover larger files (>15MB) but I still can't open them. Tried to convert from raw to jpg on exiftool and got the following error:
Bad format (36170) for SubIFD entry 0
My question is... is there any hope? The information MUST be in the files, but why can't I recover it?
Thank you in advance for the help
Recovering the RAW image data is sometimes not possible. But it is often possible to extract the full-sized JPEG preview images. I wrote a utility to do this. See this post (https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php/topic,4172.msg19805.html#msg19805) for details.
- Phil
I got the NEF file you sent by mail. It looks like random garbage to me. There are no remnants of metadata and no embedded JPEG image to be found in this file. Sorry. :(
- Phil
Thank you so much Phil, I thought that would be the case... :'(
This morning I used a software called "file juicer" on the larger files I recovered yesterday, to see if I could get anything at all. In +100 files, I got 6 jpg that weren't even taken on the date registered in the NEF file, but were in the SD card at the same time as the photos I wanted. Very strange. Maybe I should get a new SD card.
I'm going to try what you wrote in the post you linked, but I don't think I'll be that lucky.
Thanks again
- Silvia