A photo looks normal at the top, then turns gray halfway down after you copy it from a camera or drive. Before saving it in an editor, look for another copy. The gray area is a symptom: it does not by itself tell you whether the image data is missing, the transfer failed, or a viewer decoded the file differently.
Keep the source and the transferred file
Keep the file you have and work on copies saved under new names. If the original is still on the camera card, avoid taking more pictures or formatting the card. If a drive disconnects, makes unusual noises or cannot copy reliably, stop repeated attempts and consider a data-recovery specialist. Saving a new JPEG over the only damaged copy can discard data or metadata you may need later.
Look for the original on the camera, phone, card, backup drive or cloud service. If the source is healthy, copy it again to a different location and open the new copy. Do not delete the first transferred copy: it may differ in ways useful for comparison. A file size is a clue, not a diagnosis; two JPEGs from the same camera can legitimately have very different sizes.
Compare the same file in another viewer
Open the copy in the app that first showed the gray area and in a second viewer. If a clean source copy opens normally but the transferred copy does not, the copies differ; use the clean source rather than trying to repair the worse one. If the same copy renders differently across viewers, keep both observations: a display or decoding difference remains possible. If several copies show the same defect, compare them with a backup from an earlier date if one exists.
Look for an embedded preview
Some images contain a separate embedded thumbnail or preview. It may show more of the scene than the damaged main image, but it may be small, damaged itself, or absent. A clean thumbnail does not prove the full-resolution image is intact.
If you already use ExifTool, its documentation describes extracting a thumbnail. Run this against a copy and choose an output name that does not already exist:
exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage "photo-copy.jpg" > "thumbnail-copy.jpg"The redirection writes the output file and can overwrite an existing file of that name. If the tag is missing, the output may be empty; check the size and open it before relying on it. This extracts only the named thumbnail, not every possible embedded preview.
Understand what a repair can preserve
Gray may appear when a decoder cannot read part of the image, including when a file is cut short. Damage within the file can also prevent later data from decoding correctly. A gray band alone cannot tell you which happened or how much recoverable data remains.
A repair attempt may be able to save image data that a decoder can read. It cannot recover image data that was never written or has been overwritten. A newly saved JPEG can also change image quality or remove metadata, so compare the output at full size and keep the original. If the only complete view is a small thumbnail, enlarging it does not restore the lost original detail.
MendVid's JPEG repair attempts to decode readable data and save a new JPEG; a damaged header or unreadable image data may prevent an attempt from succeeding. Its pricing and repair terms, checked 4 November 2026, list US$9.99 per file. Payment is confirmed before upload, repair and preview; unsuccessful, incomplete or post-start cancelled attempts are not refunded, subject to non-waivable rights and applicable payment-processor rules. Recovery is not guaranteed.
Inspect any result before relying on it
Open the saved copy at its full dimensions and inspect the gray boundary, colors and areas that mattered in the photo. Check whether the expected date, orientation and other metadata survived if you need them. A file that opens is not necessarily a complete picture. Keep any working backup, extracted preview and original together until you know which contains the most useful detail.