Help! Hoping to have JPEG previews!

[jessicalyneross]

Hello all!

I shot a wedding where my hard drive failed and I was able to recover like 93% of the pictures. But there are some key shots missing. There are truly corrupt files that obviously have no data, but there are some that in Lightroom, the "corrupt" file is there, I can see the entire picture, but it's like it's not rendering all the way, so it's fuzzy. The file appears to have all the data, as the file size is the same as the other pictures.

I'm hopelessly idiotic when it comes to system prompts and what not. Can someone help me see if just the JPEG previews can be extracted?

Here's a link to the one of the images: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4_tvstyEcnPUGpJcWVOX3VKZDQ/view?usp=sharing

Any help would be much appreciated!

Jess

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jess,

The one you posted has no image data that I can find.  I would say that there is no way Lightroom could generate a preview from this file.  If you are seeing one for this file then Lightroom must have cached a preview somewhere else on your hard disk.

- Phil

[jessicalyneross]

Hey Phil!

Thanks for taking a look at it! It's weird because Lightroom had JPEG thumbnails from when I first had them on the hard drive. Then when I plugged in the new hard drive with the recovered files, those thumbnails then got blurry. Do you think those initial JPEG images are still somewhere on my computer in a Lightroom archive somewhere? It's weird that there's no image information in the file. What is in it? Could you tell?

Thanks again!

Jess

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jess,

I don't know about the Lightroom database, but it could well be that some previews are in there somewhere.

If you can open the file in a plain text editor you will see lots of text like "Cabinet build debug log", and "This program cannot be run in DOS mode.", so at least part of it is an executable program.

- Phil

[jessicalyneross]

Thanks Phil!

Here's what the picture preview actually looks like in Lightroom. The original photo is obviously not this blurry. Like I said, it's almost like it's just not rendering all the way.

[Phil Harvey]

Looks like Lightroom must keep a low-resolution thumbnail in its database.  I happen to have LR5 myself, and when I try to open the file you posted it says "Preview unavailable at this time", which I would expect if LR hadn't seen the file before.

- Phil