The invisible stressor of running my art studio is…corrupt jpeg image files! I don’t have the answers, but I do have the problem. It has happened most often on one particular USB drive, but it was several files over many years. I got the drive for free from a relative, I believe. Obviously, I should remove all the files from that particular drive and discard it. But, I fear it could happen anywhere at anytime, so it’s worth discussing.

The corrupted image is always saved as a jpeg and it’s usually an image I never use or an image I have uploaded to external locations habitually. For example, I added the image to documents, uploaded it online, or sent it digitally to others several times. It usually an image that I have edited by color correcting, adding a watermark, cropping, etc. Another example of ‘using the image habitually’ is changing the name of the file several times to suit the requests of the recipient of my file.

What is a corrupted jpeg file? A corrupted image file means the quality of the image is irreversibly damaged. As far as I know, it is not an external virus that ruins the file, it is degraded from within. It no longer holds the same data to represent the image that was created by scanning or photographing. Once that image is corrupted, it will usually knocks out others immediately around it. However, the thumbnail is never ruined! I have seen pixelated video files on popular youtube videos and images on websites that usually look like glitches. Perhaps the result of too many people downloading the file. But, the problem I’m having is different.

What does a corrupted jpeg look like? The image will show a specific RGB color code overtake a huge swath of the image. For example, if there is a watermark with black text in the bottom corner that I added in editing, the bottom half of the image will be black and all the data that made up the scanned painting or digital photograph is gone. I have seen RGB color codes in green, pink, blue, and etc. over take 1/3, half, or the nearly the whole image. I guess you could call that art in itself! But, years of memories and documentation are slowly eroding.

How to solve the problem? I have read online that experts can restore the corrupted image by using data information from the thumbnail which is usually not effected. However, the difference in scale and quality between the thumbnail and jpeg file might be too vast to fully improve the corrupted image. I don’t think there is a solution other than plucking out the corrupted files like weeds and clearing that USB of all data, moving it to another location.

I started to backup my files in a variety of ways years ago, although with my belongings in storage, that process is lagging now. I created PDF documents of similar images as a series like artwork, snapshots, etc. and save it because I’ve never seen a PDF get corrupted. I print out images at the corner store as 5x8in glossy photos. I upload my images to internet based cloud storage. All of these methods are archival and once the image file is reformatted in this way, I cannot access it digitally for habitual use as easily. But, archiving my images is a crucial part of being an artist, so it must be done.

Have you ever had the problem of corrupted jpegs? What did you do and how do you cope? Contact me about it! Thanks for reading.

Have a Pleasant Day!
-Rae