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No. PNG is designed to detect certain kinds of corruption, but that does not guarantee a damaged PNG will open. JPEG also has a defined recovery method for some errors, so it is not true that JPEG cannot recover. What happens depends on which bytes are damaged and how the software decoding the image handles the error.

How PNG detects damage

A PNG file starts with an eight-byte signature and then stores image data and other information in chunks. Each chunk includes a CRC—a value calculated from the chunk type and data—that a decoder can check for corruption. The W3C’s PNG Specification, Third Edition says: “PNG decoders should detect errors as early as possible, recover from errors whenever possible, and fail gracefully otherwise.”

Detection is not the same as repair. A CRC can tell a decoder that a chunk’s contents do not match its expected check value; it does not necessarily provide the original bytes needed to reconstruct the image. The decoder then has to decide whether it can safely continue.

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Some PNG errors can be skipped

PNG distinguishes between critical chunks, which are needed to interpret the image, and ancillary chunks, which hold additional information. The specification permits a decoder to ignore an unknown ancillary chunk. By contrast, a decoder trying to extract the image must report an unknown critical chunk to the user. Damage to critical structure or image data can prevent decoding, even though the format provides checks for detecting errors.

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How JPEG can recover from some errors

JPEG is not limited to either opening a perfectly intact file or rejecting it altogether. In the JPEG standard’s restart-marker recovery procedure, a decoder that loses synchronization may be able to locate a later restart marker and resume decoding. In applicable cases, it can fill missing lines and continue with subsequent data.

The procedure depends on restart markers being present and the damage being in a part of the stream where resynchronization is possible. It does not guarantee a complete or visually clean image: output near the affected restart interval may be highly corrupted.

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JPEG recovery has important limits

ITU-T T.81 warns that some errors cannot be recovered and that errors in headers are likely to be catastrophic. A damaged header can prevent a decoder from understanding how to interpret the image before the restart-marker mechanism can help. The standard is listed by ITU as in force; it was approved on 1992-09-18 and is identified as identical to ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994.

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Which damage matters most?

The affected bytes matter more than the file extension alone. Corruption in optional PNG information may be ignorable, while corruption in essential chunks may stop decoding. In JPEG, restart markers can support recovery from certain errors in the image stream, but header damage and other errors may be unrecoverable. In either format, a decoder may produce a partial or visibly damaged image, refuse to display it, or handle the problem in another way.

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The standards describe mechanisms and guidance, not how every photo app, browser, or image editor behaves. They also do not establish comparative recovery rates, so there is no standards-based basis for saying PNG is universally more recoverable than JPEG—or the reverse.

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