7 Solutions to Fix Corrupted JPEG and Other Photos on Mac

Photo corruption or damage occurs a lot, despite our efforts to avoid such situations. If you are looking for solutions on how to fix corrupted JPEG or other photos on Mac, this article will be helpful to you, we have 7 options to repair damaged photos on Mac, no matter your JPEG or other photos saved in Photos app or stored in internal even external Mac hard drive.

How to Repair Damaged JPEG Photos on Mac?

You may be recommended with different ways to repair corrupted or damaged JPEG photos on your Mac. Increasingly, users prefer to a professional JPEG repair tool to recover the damaged photos on Mac. Here are 2 options, one is professional and paid, and the other one is online and free.

#1 Use Professional JPEG Repair Tool for Mac

The benefits of using professional JPEG repair tool on Mac is that, it helps users to repair damaged JPEG and other photos saved on your Mac internal hard drive, also on external storage devices connected to your Mac. In addition, it has a higher recovery rate and performs fast to repair the images.

Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac is an easy-to-use, professional tool to recover photos, videos, documents, emails and more files from internal/external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD card, digital cameras and more devices. Its powerful scan engine can find whatever files lost or deleted. Users can see real-time scanning results and preview lost files. It only takes a click to get them back.

It also has the feature to repair JPEG files. When you check the thumbnail of a JPEG image in Cisdem, if it doesn’t show you the preview, it means the image was damaged. Cisdem will repair JPEG files when you select the JPEG file and preview it, once you can preview the image, the JPEG files are repaired and you can recover it to your local drive or cloud platforms. 

Free Download

Main features of Cisdem Data Recovery

• Recover 200+ types of files: pictures, videos, audio, emails, documents, folders, archives, etc.
• Recover files from internal and external hard drive (SD Card, flash drive, hard disk, etc)
• High scanning and recovery speed
• Filter files by entering keyword, file size, date created or modified
• Preview photos or others before recovery
• Recover files to local drive or Cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, pCloud, Box)
• Support latest operating system

How to Repair JPEG Photos on Mac?

1. Download and install Cisdem Data Recovery to your mac.
    Free Download
2. Select the location where you stored the corrupted or damaged JPEG files. 
   Go to Disk Data Recovery and choose the hard drive where your saved the JPEG files.
3. Scan for corrupted photos.
   The app will use both quick and deep scanning to find your photos. Go to Type>Graphics and find the corrupted photos of a specific format. Or you can use the filter to find a corrupted photo quickly.
4. Preview and repair damaged JEPG photos on Mac.  
   Double click on the JPEG file to preview the corrupted photos, and the repair process will auto start. Then click Recover to save the JPEG files back to your Mac or cloud platforms.

#2 Repair Damaged JPEG Photos on Mac Online Free

If you are looking for a solution to repair damaged photos on mac for free, you can try online free JPEG or Image Repair tools, for example, Online.officerecovery.com. It helps to repair corrupted JPEG, JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG and Raw images. However, it can only repair damaged photos one by one. And very often, it fails to recover the corrupted photos on Mac, you have to pay for a non-refundable $99 service fee to get help from a data recovery technician, which we don't recommend.

1. Go to online.officerecovery.com.
2. Upload a corrupted photo for recovery.
3. Click Secure Upload and Repair to start the recovery process.
4. Download the restored corrupted photo to your Mac.

How to Fix Corrupted Photos on Mac?

Photo corruption or damage can happen during reading, transferring or processing, etc. If an image is corrupted, when you attempt to open it with a photo viewer, you may get an error message, or the image can be opened but look damaged. It is annoying but still possible to fix a corrupted photo on Mac with 5 different solutions.

#1 Update Photos App

We need a photo tool to open and view the photos, if a photo viewer cannot function properly, it won’t help open and view our photos on Mac. So, first of all, check if your Mac Photos app is the most updated version, if not, update to the latest version to make it work properly. But you cannot update Photos app individually, you need to update to the latest macOS.

1. Launch App Store App on your Mac.
2. Go to Updates, click Update to upgrade your macOS and update the Photos app.
3. Open the photos again on your mac.

#2 Save to Another Folder and Reopen

Corrupted photos may be caused by bad sectors, therefore, you can copy and save the photos to another location and reopen.

1. Create a new folder under the path where all files can be viewed and opened normally.
2. Copy and paste a part of corrupted photos to the newly created folder.
3. Reopen the corrupted photos in the new folder, if can be opened, copy and save all other corrupted photos to the new folder.

#3 Change Photo Format

The format compatibility may lead to photo corruption too, especially your photos are saved in Windows-based image formats. Therefore, when your photos get corrupted on Mac, you can change its original format, by modifying the file extension or directly converting.

Change File Extension

1. Right click on the JPEG or image file.
2. Choose Rename.
3. Change the file extension to .jpg or .png or other macOS-friendly image format.

Convert Photos

1. Open photo with Preview.
2. Go to File>Export.
3. Choose JPEG or other supported format.

#4 Repair Photo Library

If the Photos in your Photos app still doesn’t work properly, your Mac Photos library may be corrupted. Sometimes, there will be an error message telling a user that some data in Photos Library can't be read or written. Despite the cause of malfunction, it’s suggested that you should use Photos’ built-in repair tool and see if it can fix the problem.

• Step 1. On your Mac, hold down the Option and Command keys while you launch Photos.
• Step 2. You will be presented with the Repair Library dialog box.
  Click Repair, which might be followed by a request to enter user password. 
• Step 3. The progress bar in the middle of the interface will inform you of the process of the fixing.
  Once it is finished, Photos should open the library like it normally does. The time spent will depend on the size of your photo collection. If it’s a huge one, the repair may take a rather long time with little visible progress, so it may appear stuck at some point.
• Step 4. Reopen the photos in your Photos App.

#5 Rebuild Photo Library

If the Photo Library repair doesn’t work, you will have to rebuild the Photo Library. But before rebuilding your Mac photo library, you are recommended to export your corrupted photos to a specified folder first.

1. Open Photos App.
2. Choose all corrupted photos you want to fix on Mac.
3. Go to File>Export>Export XX Photos…
4. Click Export and choose the output folder to export your corrupted photos.
5. Then quit Photos App.
6. Press and hold Option (Alt) Key, and open Photos App.
7. Choose Create New, rename and select the location.
8. Click OK, then run Photos App, go to File>Import, add the photos to Photos Library for opening.

Conclusion

It was a disater to have images corrupted or damaged in the old days, now we have professional tools developed to repair JPEGs or other images, even there are online free service provided. There are known and unknown reasons causing damaged photos on Mac, it seems to be inevitable, so we should have the habit of backing up files on regular basis.