jpeg thumbnail in windows different than actual photo???

[iplayloudly]

sorry if this is off-topic, i'm new here... but i have some pictures that i took with my digital camera and when i copy them to the computer, the pictures look fine on the file thumbnail in windows explorer, but some of them look scrambled with i open them up. If the files are somehow corrupted, is there any possible way to get the photo back the way its supposed to be? The data is obviously there if it looks right on the thumbnail...

Just for the record, i've tried opening them up on different computers with different operating systems, and its always the same. thanks for any help you guys can give me.

[Guillermo Freige]

I'm sorry to tell you this, but the thumbnail is in fact a different picture than the full one, store in the EXIF data, so it's perfectly possible to have a valid thumbnail in a totally corrupted picture. If you've tried in different computers, and I assume you downloaded it from the CF card in each one of them, the picture is already corrupted in the card. Sorry.

[mtd]

Sorry to dredge up an such an old post, but I have a similar issue. I have 2 JPG files that were cropped and I guess they were saved over the original file. The thumbnail I see is the original, but the actual file is cropped.

There is some information in the original that I'm trying to see and I'm hoping there is some way to view the thunbnail large enough to make out what it says.

Any ideas on how to extract the thumbnail from the exif data so I can see it as a separate file? I know it's probably going to be too small to doing anything with but I need to give it a shot.

Thanks!

[Jon]

Is this file RAW or JPEG? If it's JPEG, you're just seeing the thumbnail cached by Windows, and I don't believe you'll be able to recover the whole picture.