Recovered file is rated excellent, but format is not recognized by my PC

Trying to recover jpg files from an SD card. Photos I want are rated excellent by Recuva, but the format is not recognized by any of my photo programs. I just purchased the Pro version of Reuva with the hope of restoring these lost photos. Recovered photo comes up a _MG_xxxx instead of IMG_xxxx. Any ideas?

Do you have Irfanview amongst your photo viewers?

I believe that ‘Excellent’ in Recuva just means that it has found the correct number of bytes to be recovered, so there is an ‘excellent’ chance of recovering whatever those bytes contain.
But it can’t know if those bytes contain the ‘right’ data or not; the only way to find that out is by recovering the file and then trying to open it.

Many users have reported that Irfanview can open recovered images that other viewers can’t.
Irfanview seems to be more tolerant of damaged images and damaged image headers and will show what it can rather than just rejecting them outright.
Saving the image from Irfanview then ‘repairs’ it so that other viewers can open it.
(Do a ‘Save As’ to change/correct the filenames at the same time if you like).

You can get Irfanview here: https://www.irfanview.com/

If even Irfanview can’t open them then you could try one of the many online, or downloadable, image repair tools.

Please let us know how you get on, and if you do manage to repair/view the recovered files what you used to do that.
It could help others looking for solutions that work.

Tried Irfanview without success. So far I have been able to recover a few photos, but there are many that I could not. Could you recommend some image repair tools?

Sorry, I can’t recommend any particular one because I have never had to use any recently.
I make regular backups of my system and files - so if something goes wrong I don’t need recovery or repair tools anymore, except for when trying to help others and Irfanview usually does the job.

One thing that you might try is the batch conversion tool in Irfanview, (a ‘batch’ can be just one file) sometimes converting a problen file from a jpeg, png, img, or bmp format to one of the other formats can make the problem file openable.
I have used it a few times to repair files by batch converting them.
It is a very powerful tool with a lot of options, but the basics are fairly easy to grasp:

Other than that the best that I can suggest is to try a few different repair apps on (copies of) the problem images.

I thank you for that suggestion. I normally keep multiple backups as well. Towards the end of 2023 I had not edited some camera photo downloads and had not backed them up. I only keep the current year photos on my desktop and at the beginning of a new year I discard the previous year photos. I did so without making sure the photos were backed up. Good thing is there are not many photos lost that I really wanted to save.

Sometimes we make mistakes, or drives fail, and files do get lost for good.

Hopefully you will eventually manage to get them back.

There is of course an option that we haven’t mentioned yet, there are other recovery softwares besides Recuva that you could try.
As this is a company forum we don’t normally give recommendations for rival softwares, but as a general guide see: The 21 Best Free Data Recovery Software Tools of 2024