Please Help: Random Conversion of Photos/Video to Unknown File Formats (.AVA, .BPG, .BPO)

[Parcae]

Hello Everyone,

Just the other day, I wanted to upload the photos which I did took for a work event.

Upon inserting the SD card into my computer, I noticed that a great many of the files (about one quarter) were converted to formats such as .AVA or .BPG or .BP0. This includes some of the photos and ALL of the videos. I did some research and found out that:

.AVA files are used by Photoshop, among others.

.BPG extension´s are so-called 'Borland Project Group' files which bear some relation or other to Delphi. You can read more about this file-type here.

I can tell by the size of the files that the videos were converted both to .BPG and .AVA formats. Same with photos.

The memory card on which these pictures was stored was used to transfer photos twice before I used it in my computer. The first time it was used on the day of the event to transfer photos to a Mac. The second time, I used it on a work PC to transfer the files to the server. This work computer had Photoshop CS5 installed on it.

During the transfer, I browsed through the photos and everything, including the videos, seemed to be working fine. After this second time, i plugged in the card to transfer the photos to my home PC. This is when I received an error message claiming files on the card were corrupt. I then checked the card and saw this multitude of file-types which I have never before seen.

An additional interesting fact: The items in the DCIM folder add up to to about 4.2 gigabytes of data. However, it appears that there is actually 6+ gigabytes of data on the card. There are no other folders though and I cannot see any more files...

The equipment I was using is as follows:

Nikon D300S

MicroSD card with SD Adapter.

I wanted to ask the people here at DPReview if they have ever experienced issues of this kind. Personally, this has never happened to me before and I find it quite disconcerting. I was thinking it might be an issue with the memory card, but why would it work perfectly twice and then suddenly decide to convert files? Then it occurred to me that Adobe Bridge on the work computer might have done something to the photos while trying to index them. But i'm not sure to what extent this can happen...

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Sebastian

 

[Bob Collette]

I have not experienced this problem, nor do I have any Nikon equipment. However, my first thought is that the images that has the odd file extensions are probably JPEG images with modified (corrupt) file extensions. In other words, if you took one of the "odd" files and changed the file extension from whatever it was to be .jpg, would the file open properly? My guess is that it likely will. If that is the case, all you will need to do is to change the file extensions on the "bad" files.

 

[abelits]

There are two possibilities:

1. Data on your card is corrupt.

Very likely you will never recover all photos, however some files will probably turn out to be JPEGs or RAWs.

2. Your adapter corrupts the data when it reads the card.

TAKE THE CARD OUT, USE THE "LOCK" SWITCH TO SET READ-ONLY MODE, COPY THE CONTENTS ON ANOTHER COMPUTER, THEN TAKE IT OUT, SWITCH BACK INTO READ-WRITE MODE, AND FORMAT IT IN THE CAMERA!

Otherwise, your computer will try to update the data on the card based on whatever it got from the broken adapter, and this will turn the situation into (1).

 

[Cameronjpu]

Interestingly, I am having the same exact issue. It seems there must be something out there that can cause not just a single camera but unrelated cameras (in very small numbers mind you) to corrupt pictures into BPG files. I tried renaming and no dice. Most interesting is that the files are indeed the correct size to be JPGs from this camera, so it's GOT to be something like that. But not simply a file extension corruption. Please post back if you actually found a solution to this and I will do the same.

 

[malch]

First secure a backup/copy of your files, as was already mentioned.

Then try opening some of these files with IrfanView. It's pretty good at recognizing files (at least JPEG's) with incorrect extensions. It even offers to fix them for you.

It will be interesting/instructive to know whether the image data is intact or not.

 

[Cameronjpu]

No dice on getting Irfanview to open it. I ended up using a program called Photorecovery to scan the flash drive and it automatically recovered all the pictures without any trouble. You can buy it online for $40, which seems like a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it.

 

[kelpdiver]

Cameronjpu wrote:

No dice on getting Irfanview to open it. I ended up using a program called Photorecovery to scan the flash drive and it automatically recovered all the pictures without any trouble. You can buy it online for $40, which seems like a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it.

I recently had an odd event where the SD card in my 5D displayed 216 files, but when I tried to copy them the interface froze up. My suspicion is that at some point I didn't eject and it actually got angry about it. Now when I mounted it, instead of EOS DIGITAL, I was seeing a few characters removed, but it still shows the files. Put it back in the camera - nothing in sight.

It was a transcend card - I used their free recovery tool and it copied them all over. Changed the names, however. This looks like FAT table corruption. The files themselves were unaffected, but the OS couldn't find them. I then proceeded to use an integrity checker to write to and verify all the blocks on the card.