JPEGs without meta information

[devil]

I was on a bicycle trip and the battery of my SLR busted and wsas unusable. As there was no new battery available along my journey, I used the smartphone camera. After I was back I downloaded the pictures from the phone to the PC with the help of airdroid. At the same time I deleted the pics on the phone. Unpacking the zipfile with the pics I had to learn that not one of them would display, as they had lost their meta-information.


Does anyone know a tool that could open those pics and let me add new meta-information or that restores the info? I looked at exiftool (package name: libimage-exiftool-perl), which is very powerful but does not do what i need.


greetz
devil

[der_bud]

I remember that some time ago I repaired corrupted exif information (after an undelete from SD-card) with a tool called jhead.
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/  -> "...Create new minimal exif header containing date and thumbnail"
It is available via apt-get.

[devil]

Thanks for the suggestion.
Unfortunately

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jhead -mkexif foo.jpg only gives

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Skipping readonly file foo.jpg
Any ideas on that? I don't have much of a clue on photo tools.


greetz
devil

[bluelupo]

@devil: maybe that helps here.

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$ exiftool -all= foo.jpg


and then

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$ jhead -mkexif foo.jpg


[devil]

After fixing some rights on those pics, file says:

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file IMG_20140805_135018.JPEG
IMG_20140805_135018.JPEG: data
Pictures that are not corrupt display as:

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JPEG image data, EXIF standard
Any ideas if those pics are retrievable at all?

Edit: exiftool, as suggested by bluelupo says:

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Error: Not a valid JPEG - foo.JPEG


Edit 2: gwenview says, the pics have no EXIF, IPTC or XMP infos at all

greetz
devil

[bluelupo]

helps this?

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$ jhead -purejpg foo.jpg && jhead -mkexif foo.bar


more infomation: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/usage.html

[devil]

Unfortunately the same as before:

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Not JPEG: foo.jpg
I have read through your link before without finding anything that works.


greetz
devil

[rueX]

da gab es doch mal papaya cms ...

http://www.papaya-cms.com/doc/papaya-cms/de/basissystem/5.1.5/ch06s04s07.html

und dort rückwärts blättern ...war früher immer open source . . . ist doch gnu ?

[sunrat]

I had one instance of incomplete data transfer using Airdroid. I'm not sure what caused it and it usually works correctly.

[piper]

devil, sorry to hear that, I had that happen also, not just with pictures, but important crap (yes, backed up to cloud also,  but still)  one of the main reasons I dropped airdroid,  zipfiles are hit & miss and way too many times are corrupted. I switched to droidoverwifi some time ago and never looked back.

I did get lucky with some of my pictures (of course not the ones I really wanted to keep) by converting them to .png  (imagemagick)

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convert snapshot.jpg  snapshot.png

Not saying this will work or save the day, but worth a try

https://people.debian.org/~naoliv/misc/imagemagick/link/www/convert.html

[jure]

the problem with the zip files is not unknown in airdroid, the same here i can`t open the downloaded photos in the extracted zip file
http://forum.airdroid.com/categories/bugs/p4

the hint  http://forum.airdroid.com/discussion/13206/downloaded-zip-files-won039t-open-galaxy-4-mac

As to the zip issue, please go to Settings in AirDroid app > Encoding for zip file > change it from UTF-8 to GBK or from GBK to UTF-8.

did not work for me ...

[dibl]

I switched to droidoverwifi some time ago and never looked back.

Wow, what a great tip -- thanks Piper!  This app looks really nice, sorry about Devil's tragedy but this is a good outcome for those who need such a tool.

[devil]

Well, about to give up. Convert to png  from the great imagemagick did not do the trick either:

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convert.im6: Not a JPEG file: starts with 0x00 0x00 `IMG_20140805_135018.JPEG' @ error/jpeg.c/JPEGErrorHandler/316.. Any more ideas?


greetz
devil

[dibl]

Way out of my experience, but have you taken a look at one of those files with okteta?  If you can use okteta to examine a known valid .jpg file, maybe with the help of google you could figure out where the "validity" in the file is set, and change the broken file(s) accordingly.  It's a reach, but that's something I would try before throwing in the towel.


EDIT:  A quick look at some of my image files, created with a camera and another modified and saved with gimp, and with okteta I see I have both EXIF and JFIF formats.  See here. If you could copy valid EXIF headers from a known good file and overwrite the bad headers on a bad file, possibly you could end up with a "valid-looking" .jpg file with wrong EXIF on it.

[der_bud]

One last resort, if the zip-file you got from android is somehow not compatible,  you could try to open that zip on a complete different system (someones Mac or Windows).