Recently, I was browsing through my Google+ photos on my Android phone and I noticed that many of them appear to have been corrupted. They are covered in varying patterns of colored bars. I've noticed that the exact same pictures are also corrupt on the web interface of Google+, and when downloading photos on desktop and mobile. Disturbingly, the corruption appears to be retroactive – photos going back to 2012 are now corrupt. All photos appeared to upload correctly originally, but then the corruption happened sometime in early 2014.
My phone is a Verizon Galaxy SIII, stock Android 4.3, using auto backup with Google+. I've attached a screenshot of the Google+ web interface showing some of the corrupted photos.
Is there any way to recover affected photos and to prevent this issue from recurring?
Best Answer
IMPORTANT Google+ is shutting down on April 2. All your data will vanish.
Download all your pix, corrupt or not and save locally.
Announcement here: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133?hl=en
Meanwhile...
Not quite a web-apps answer, but leaning more to a superuser answer.
https://www.jihosoft.com/free-utilities/jpeg-repair-tool.html
lists several apps that claim to repair jpeg images. As with all data recovery, it's a bit of a crap shoot.
You can find more with a google search 'corrupt jpeg recovery'
Note: Free software is often worth what you pay for it, and may be a vehicle to put malware on your computer. In general I suggest that you download a virtual machine, either a pre-made one, or download virtual-box and install an OS on it. Either lock that VM or make a copy, install the software, and test it out. After, revert your VM to it's previous state or discard the copy.