Corrupted Photo format

A lot of times recovery applications will find raw files and misidentify them as more standard .tiff files. Often all one needs to do is change the file extensions from .tiff back to the original extension for whatever raw format they were saved using.

For example, I once accidentally deleted an entire directory but caught it immediately before anything had been over written. The raw files were from Canon cameras that output raw .cr2 files. The recovery utility had misidentified the files as .tiff files. All I had to do was use a bulk renaming application to change the extensions from .tiff to .cr2 and they were as good as new.

Not much of an answer, but note that recovery software doesn't change the format of anything. It just scans the entire disk for what look like files, and restores them to the file allocation table if they aren't there already. It may however apply the wrong filename to the restored file, and more problematically, it might apply the wrong file extension to the filename.

Your operating system uses the file extension to tell you what kind of file you are dealing with. Whatever extension these recovered files have now, your OS thinks they are "Sony Digital Camera Image". But you could equally change the file extension to .txt and your OS would instantly tell you that they are "Text Files". Changing the file extension does no format conversion.

So, you just need to find out what file extension the files should have, and restore it manually. (Hint... Open one of the files in a text editor. It will display as gobbledygook. But just look at the first line or two... you will often get a nice hint here as to what the actual format of the file is.)

One more thing... I don't know about RAW files, but I've noticed that, helpfully, IrfanView will warn you when it opens an image file that has the wrong extension, and offer to change it for you.