A friend of mine sent an e-mail to my Yahoo! account earlier today. The e-mail includes an attachment with a .jpg extension. I’m assuming it’s a photo (or some kind of graphic file) and I know that .jpg is pretty standard, yet when I try to open the attachment I’m given an “unknown file type” message in whatever viewer program I’m using (Irfanview, Microsoft Photo Editor, Image Viewer, et cetera). Can anyone help me figure out what’s up? Is there something wrong with the file itself that’s making it impossible to open, or is it the extension that’s causing problems?
if you are explicitly telling the programs to load the file, and the viewers can’t read it, then likely the file is corrupt. I can vouch for Irfanview, it’s a hell of a program. If that can’t figure it out, it’s probably a bad file.
As far as I can tell, it’s straight-up .jpg. I figured the file was likely corrupted; thanks for confirming that. I just e-mailed my friend asking her to re-send the attachment; now I’m just hoping that she doesn’t attach the same one all over again…
Funny thing, too, because it piqued my curiosity when I saw the attachment (which was her name with a .jpg extension); I wasn’t expecting any pictures from her, and she didn’t mention it in the e-mail. So now I wanna know what it is!
I found that MS Photo Editor is routinely unable to identify jpg and gif file types. In fact, I have NEVER had Photo Editor correctly open a jpg photo (what the hell is it good for then, you might ask. Well, I don’t know). I’d try to open it using Explorer (save it to your desktop then right-click and choose the “open with” option.)
Thanks, Hello Again; I tried that and it didn’t work. Which leads me to a follow-up question: If my friend doesn’t ever re-send the JPG, and my curiosity gets to be too much to bear–is there anyway to salvage a corrupted file? Can’t something be done?
You know, An E-mail with an attachement that the sender doesn’t mention does sound like it could be a vbs virus. Have you confirmed with your friend that they did send you a picture? I would try to open it in notepad to see if there is any text you can make out.
Have you tried to view the file’s contents in a text editor, such as Notepad? Obviously you can’t view the file itself this way, but you will be able to tell if it’s a JPEG. Most of what you’ll see is gibberish, but in the top line you will see the letters JFIF if the file was at least intended to be a JPEG.
Sounds like a corrupted file to me, too. Alternatively, if your friend works in graphics, I’ve sometimes made the mistake of saving JPEGs in CMYK mode rather than RGB mode, and they don’t properly open with normal viewers. Perhaps this could be the problem. You can only open these files with graphics programs that can work in the CMYK color space (like Photoshop, for instance.) However, if it’s a file she’s just passing on from elsewhere, then it’s either corrupted or not a graphics file to begin with. (See the comments about .jpg.vbs files.)
With programs like Photoshop, you’ll get a more specific comment on what exactly is wrong (Incorrect JPEG marker, Truncated File, Corrupted JPEG, etc…)
It’s very likely a virus. Make sure you don’t have file extensions hidden in Windows (it’s often turned on by defauly, lamely). It’s likely that your friend ran the virus, and you were sent the file (probably blah.jpg.vbs) automatically, being in the address book. Tell your friend to run a virus scanner ASAP. Search your drive for any files with the extension .VBS. These are Visual Basic script files, and potentially (read: USUALLY) viruses.
We can thank Microsoft for their oh-so-helpful Outlook macros for this.
