Installation

To install recoverjpeg, as root run

./configure && make install

To use sort-pictures, you need to install:

exif: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libexif
ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/

Usage

Look at the manual pages for recoverjpeg(1) and sort-pictures(1).

History

recoverjpeg was written on 23 December 2004 after a huge mistake: a disk containing pictures was repartitioned and a new operating system was installed on top. recoverjpeg and sort-pictures ran on this 80GB disk and rescued 19222 pictures (11GB):

9538 pictures sorted by date (a few of them were corrupted in a way that no software can detect as they are valid JFIF files) and taken on 337 different days
1310 JFIF files without date (some of them were correct pictures whose exif data had been corrupted)
8301 JFIF files too small to be digital pictures (no error there, most of them were thumbnails of real pictures previously made by software such as gqview)
71 invalid JFIF files
4 pictures recorded at a date of 0000-00-00 (probably a bug in the camera used to take the pictures)

Of course, I had a backup of everything, but I cannot seem to remember where I put it.

Portability

recoverjpeg has been tested on:

FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT (from 21 November 2004) on ix86
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE on ix86
Debian 3.1/ix86 (2.6.9 kernel)
Debian 3.1/UltraSparc (2.4.21 kernel)
Solaris 2.9/UltraSparc

You need to ensure that the off_t type from the C library and the lseek() function support offsets of at least the size of the device you want to recover pictures from.

Contact information

Home page: http://www.rfc1149.net/devel/recoverjpeg Author: Samuel Tardieu <sam@rfc1149.net> http://www.rfc1149.net/sam

Thanks

The following beta-testers and contributors are warmly thanked:

Olivier Beyssac <ob@r14.freenix.org>
Pierre Beyssac <pb@eu.org>
Bertrand Petit <elrond@phoe.frmug.org>