MediaRescue
Decode every photo in a folder and learn which ones are actually still good.
Free right now — no account, no card
Preview
1 interface design, then a screenshot of it running. Drag, scroll or use the arrows.
Free while we’re in preview
Get MediaRescue
Decode every photo in a folder and learn which ones are actually still good.
The Mac button is for Apple Silicon. On an older Intel Mac, get this one instead.
One file, both ways. Double-click it for the window. Run the same file from a command prompt with arguments and it behaves as the command-line tool, because the engine is inside it. Nothing else to download and nothing to keep beside it.
Early preview. The window has been built and run, but not yet on a real Windows PC or Mac, so expect rough edges. The engine underneath it is fully tested.
- One file — no installer
- Runs on your machine, offline
- Source code published below
Free while in preview. It isn’t signed yet, so Windows or macOS will ask you to confirm the first time you open it. At launch, MediaRescue is included in every plan along with the rest of the range.
Six verdicts, one per file
A half-finished card pull leaves you with a folder of photos and no idea which survived. Thumbnails lie. A file with a perfectly good JPEG header can still be missing most of its pixels.
MediaRescue decodes every image the whole way through, to the last pixel, and gives each one verdict: HEALTHY, TRUNCATED, CORRUPT, MISLABELLED, EMPTY or UNREADABLE. Truncated is decided structurally, by whether the format’s end marker survived (PNG IEND, JPEG FF D9, GIF 0x3B), so a file that ran out of bytes is told apart from one that’s damaged inside rather than guessed at from a decoder’s error text.
scan writes nothing at all. quarantine moves the classes you list into a mirror of your folder structure, and stays a preview until you add --apply. HEALTHY isn’t a class you’re allowed to pick.
It doesn’t repair, and it never deletes
There’s no repair code in here and no delete command. PhotoRevive is the repair step, and pointing it at your quarantine folder is the intended next move.
Formats are PNG, JPEG and GIF. Files with any other extension are ignored completely, so no RAW, no HEIC, no video.
Reading on the job itself
- How to recover photos from a memory card Take the card out and make a byte-for-byte image of it. Everything after that happens on the image file, so...
- Why won't this video play? Read the container structure before you try to repair anything. An MP4 is a tree of boxes with declared siz...
Advanced & technical details Command-line builds, source code, checksums and a recorded session — for developers and IT teams
A working desktop prototype of photo-library triage: it fully decodes every image rather than trusting headers, and gives each a verdict — healthy, truncated, corrupt, mislabelled, empty or unreadable — then quarantines only the classes you choose. Verified against a fixture with predicted verdicts: all six matched, including a truncated file that still carries a perfectly valid PNG signature and fools header-only tools. It never repairs (that is PhotoRevive) and never deletes.
Recorded session
Naming status
Working name only — brand verdict **AVOID** (Very High). Collision: MediaRescue / MediaRescue Pro. Rename completely.
What it draws on
Existing paid software whose best ideas shaped this program: Wondershare Recoverit, Wondershare Repairit, Stellar Repair for Video, Stellar Photo Recovery.
Command line
There is nothing extra to install. The program you download is the command-line tool as well: give it arguments instead of double-clicking it and it runs as one, with its output on your terminal. The standalone builds below are the same engine on its own, for machines where you would rather not ship a window at all.
MediaRescue - one-command triage for a photo library
Every image is fully decoded, not just sniffed, and gets one verdict:
HEALTHY decodes completely
TRUNCATED valid header, image data ends early
CORRUPT damaged or structurally invalid image data
MISLABELLED real format does not match the file extension
EMPTY zero bytes
UNREADABLE permission or I/O error
Usage:
mediarescue scan <dir> [--recursive] [--json]
mediarescue quarantine <dir> --quarantine <qdir> [--classes truncated,corrupt,empty] [--recursive] [--apply]
mediarescue verify <file> [--json]
mediarescue help
MediaRescue never repairs and never deletes: damaged files are MOVED to a
quarantine directory, and only when you pass --apply.
Run "mediarescue <command> -h" for details on a specific command.Recorded from the shipped binary, not written by hand.
Source
Every file the program is built from:
console.go · console_test.go · guided.go · main.go
SHA-256 checksums · build instructions & scope notes · full build plan