Next step for "File format error"?

[clanderson505]

Dear Exiftool community,

My story is yet another addition to the classic "trying to salvage corrupted photos of my wedding" genre. 

While many of the photos our photographer took (he used both Nikon 600E and 800E cameras) turned out, there are several large blocks of time during which all the photos he took were corrupted.  He said they are hopeless, but I got him to share them with me in hopes I could google up a solution. 

So far I tried Phil Harvey's "fix_corrupted_nef_win" program, and it tells me that the file is not from a Nikon type that is supported.  It's supposed to be compatible with 600 and 800 models, so maybe it's garbled beyond recognition?

I have also tried to read the corrupted NEFs with exiftool via command line and I received the "file format error."  From other threads that have mentioned this problem it seems like the implications could range from indeed being hopeless, to something being salvageable with extract_preview.

I am not experienced with coding, so I thought at this point I would ask for advice.  If the prevailing wisdom was that it might be worth a chance, I would happily go down that road!  But it would also be really good to know if the photos are indeed hopeless, particularly because my parents want to pay data recovery people to try.  My folks aren't tech savvy, and I don't like the idea of people charging them a lot of money with no possibility of success.

The link to the corrupted photos is below.  Any thoughts or advice the community has would be most welcome!

With gratitude,

Craig

http://tbf.me/a/ZrNkY

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Craig,

I downloaded _DSC4334.NEF and it was full of hex 0xff's -- no useful data there at all.

But if you got a message saying the model wasn't supported then there must have been some metadata in at least one of the files.

Try zipping the files individually.  Files full of 0xff's will zip down very small, but if a file contains a useful raw image it won't get much smaller when you zip it.  If you do this, tell me the names of a few files that look like they may contain some data (ie. don't compress well) and I'll take another look.

- Phil

[clanderson505]

Phil, I really appreciate the advice!  Compressing them down to see if there is anything in there is a great idea.

I've gone through about 15% of the photos and they all have compressed down to ~75kb just like #4334. 

It is looking like the situation is indeed hopeless, but I will continue going through them and post an update should I find files that actual contain data.

Thank you again,

Craig