fixing corrupt Nikon files

[wordplanet]

Hi:
About a year ago I went to Iceland to shoot stock photos and walked for about four hours to find this lighthouse. Took some awesome photos of the lighthouse and the early morning along the shore, and they looked fine in Nikon Transfer when I transferred them to my laptop, but when I went to open the RAW files and actually work on them a week or so later, many were corrupt. I have since gotten LR4 and use that to ingest all my files. Nikon insisted I must have failed to format the SD card - but I was pretty sure I had since I don't think it would have worked at all otherwise.  I used the same card afterwards and the files were fine.

Anyway, when I saw that you had this tool I was excited, but the camera I was using was a D3100 which I bought as a lightweight backup to my D700. I'm assuming the D3200 and D3100 are pretty similar. Can I give your software it a try? I'd love to recover those once in a lifetime photos. Would I need to do anything differently if I'm trying to recover D3100 files?

Look forward to your advice. Thanks.

-Marianne

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Marianne,

My fix_corrupted_nef utility fixes only a very specific type of corruption caused when downloading images with older versions of the Nikon software.  However, if you email me an image (philharvey66 at gmail.com) I'll take a look to see if anything is salvageable.

- Phil

BTW, it wasn't this lighthouse by any chance, was it?  (I was in Iceland myself in July.)

[Tarn]

Hi Phil.

My fix_corrupted_nef utility fixes only a very specific type of corruption caused when downloading images with older versions of the Nikon software.

Just so I know... what, specific type of corruption(s) does your fix correct? Just curious in case I ever run into the problem with my own, or someone else's files.

I used Nikon transfer ONCE. While I didn't notice any corruption in those particular files, I did not care for how the software worked and got rid of it.

Thanks.

[Phil Harvey]

The problem is that older versions of the Nikon software can confuse the RAW data with an embedded preview, so they store it as if it was a JPEG image.  The data is still there, but disguised, and some of the raw parameters are lost.  When corrupted, the RAW image can no longer be opened by other utilities.  The fix_corrupted_nef utility reconstructs the RAW IFD to fix this.

- Phil

[Tarn]

Good to know. Thanks.