creeping corruption of .jpg files?

[eazcdr]

My archive of jpgs, mainly from canon camera is gradually getting corrupted.
They were all fine and are now about 50% of them fail to load into any graphics viewer incl. Irfan. Mostly you get "drawing failed" although the thumbnail looks okay, mostly.
Looks like a worm or virus but Sophos doesn't indicate any infection.
Anyone else run into this and possible fix?

thanks
Chris

 

[Quadophile]

Sorry I cannot provide you the solution as this is first for me. I know jpgs go bad as time passes but not to this extent that you inform us. I suggest you take a look at this thread and decide what to do in future when you save your pictures.

Phtotography Tips

The link will provide you with many tips including this one which actually is related to your current problem:

Save Photos in TIFF Format If You're Altering Them

If you are going to crop or otherwise alter a photo on your computer, first resave the image in TIFF format, rather than in JPEG, which is the most common image format.

Every time a JPEG file is opened and resaved, data are thrown out and rebuilt, so the file starts to degrade. A TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) file takes up more space in your computer's memory but will better preserve image quality as you work with your photo.

 

[silver]

jpegs degrade in terms of image quality if you open them up and resave them because they get recompressed and jpeg is a 'lossy' compression method,. but so long as you keep the originals and work from them w/o saving back over the top there's no issue,.

the degrade you mention sounds like it is not related to normal jpeg loss of quality recompression,. it sounds like you have an issue with your computer - either a virus or your harddrive is about to go kaputt,. suggest you burn what you can to CD or something (though of course CDs themselves degrade quite badly over time - so that is not ideal!)

Sil