Pictures only open in thumbnail size

I took pictures at a family wedding with a Cannon Rebel Camera. They came out great and I even used on for me wall paper. Then I started having problems with the computer so I copied the pictures to an external hard drive and had the computer reformatted. Once it was up and running, I copied the pictures back to the hard drive and even though they are in the same folder, same size, some will open up large and can be used as a wall paper and some only open in a thumbnail size and if I enlarge it, it gets blurry. Anyone know How I can change the attributes back so when I double click on it, it opens full screen like some of the others? P.S. I tried opening it with infrview, internet explorer, microsoft picture viewer, etc....

I am running Windows XP home

I suggest you first try copying the pictures from the external hard drive to a different computer. See what happens when you view them. If you get the same results, then unfortunately, they may have been corrupted when they were originally copied to the external drive. You could also try (if you haven't already) making a second copy of them on your current computer, in case they were corrupted when you originally copied them back.

When I make backup copies of photos, I like to use picture viewer software to view each one of the copies in order to insure that they are OK. I have had CD's I made of photos corrupts a few of them, so I check each photo CD afterwards to make sure that is OK. The file size may not be a reliable indicator of corruption. External hard drives have also had the same issue with files (not just pictures). With non-replaceable photos, you can never have too many verified copies on different media and stored in different locations.

When you burn graphics to CD/DVDs, slow the burn down or they will be corrupted.
Or the disk will be coaster. Either is bad in my book.

I have had 4x CD creation processes result in corrupted files, so I still check the results. I generally check the option to verify the CD/DVD afterwards also.

Thanks for your replies.

The file size for the small ones are about 4.17 KB and dimensions of 130 x 97

The file size for the ones still working is 2.69 MB and dimentsion of 3888 x 2592; and one even says it is 46.7 KB with dimensions of 664 x 448.

I took all this the same time and they all worked before, so how is it that just some of the pictures are small and the rest still large. Was this the work of the virus that forced me to reformat? Why only some of the pictures? and Can they be repaired?


I'll try your suggestions. When I backed-up the pictures, I just right clicked the high-lighted my "pictures" folder using Windows explorer and just dragged the entire folder over to my external drive and chose "copy" as the command. As there are over a 1000 pictures, this took almost an hour.

The file sizes you report appear to be reasonable for the reported image pixel sizes. It is possible that the virus corrupted some of them. Whether they are repairable or not is unknown, but it is probably unlikely. I usually copy the files as you did, but for more security, you can use a program like SyncBack from 2BrightSparks. That program has the option to check file sizes, dates, and hash values for the files, so you can detect any differences caused by corruption during the copy process.