Can this digitally damaged photo (and 100 others like it) be fixed?

[kirsch92]

I downloaded the attached photo from my wife's iPhone about four years ago, along with a 100 or so others that I guess must have been on a damaged part of the phones memory, and am just now getting around to seeing if they can be salvaged.
I don't know how they got like this. This one has a vertical gray band in the middle and near the very top of the gray band there is a tiny "thumbnail" of the original picture. I have no idea what caused it or if the pics are salvageable. I can open them just fine in the photos app with the exception to them looking messed up, and exporting them modified or unmodified still leaves the problem.
Worst case I can try and crop a few to make them sort of usable, but was wondering if anyone has seen this before and if it can be fixed.

 

[mollyc]

does she still have the phone? if so, do they look like that on the phone? I don't think there is any real way of fixing something like this other than cropping, which will give you a weird ratio.

 

[Slartibart]

What format are these? Did you try to open them in something like Photoshop, Gimp, Graphicconverter, etc? Or you can try to open the photo in Firefox or Chrome - just drag and drop it in an empty browser window. Webbrowser are quite tolerant of corrupted JPEGs or PNGs. Because Safari uses the same frameworks as Photos it is probably not an option, but you can of course check. Which version of MacOS are you using?

 

[Steven-iphone]

Crop them. Cut out the grey band. Stitch back together and make diptychs out of them.

 

[Slartibart]

If you take a look at the "embedded" little preview of the complete photo you can conclude that at least the header of the image file is some how corrupted. At best there is just an offset - the image data is apparently composed using 2x the data from the right half of the image - or is the uploaded image a screenshot cropped by the OP?

What format have these images? Depending on that, there are not too many possibilities what one can do - but several things you can do.
For example all jpeg headers start with the three valid hexadecimal digits FF D8 FF. It is not too difficult to check, and if damaged, to correct it by simply change them to the right values. Or you skip/delete the file header and load just the data from the file. Or you run a repair script/program. …

Maybe the OP can provide access to one “original” via whatever cloud storage?