Strange error in reopening processed images

I am hoping one of you experts can offer a little advise!

I went to open up some files tonight and it reminded me of this error I uncovered a while ago. When I was doing a little clean up on some post-Hurricane Irene images, I added my signature watermark, and re-saved the file as a jpeg. I neglected to flatten the image though, so I ended up with huge files... 80MB or so.

So tonight, I thought I would open them up, flatten the layers, and get the file size down to something manageable. However, when I try to open the file in Elements or Photoshop I get this error: "Could not complete your request because an unknown or invalid JPEG marker type is found."

They open fine in "Preview" on my Macbook.

Does anyone have any bright ideas? It's not a huge deal as I still have my originals, but it would save about 4,000 hours of "despeckling"!

Thanks in advance

Open in Preview then go File > Export and save it as something else.

Maybe they have been labelled with the wrong file type in the suffix. If they are layered files they are likely PSD (or TIF) and not JPG.

Maybe Preview can work it out, but PS not.

Try manually changing this.

Alex

Maybe they have been labelled with the wrong file type in the suffix. If they are layered files they are likely PSD (or TIF) and not JPG.

 

Maybe Preview can work it out, but PS not.

 

Try manually changing this.

 

Alex

Agree with Alex, files are probably mislabeled. Layered PS files are never JPEG.

Agree with Alex, files are probably mislabeled. Layered PS files are never JPEG.

Go figure... Thanks folks. I'll try what you suggest and report back...

Edit: I once I had a graphic artist explain to a client why you couldn't just change the extension on a file and have a new kind of file (The client was trying to "create" and .eps from a .jpg by just changing the extension...) She said, "Just because you name your cat Rover, it doesn't make it a dog".

Apparently this situation is an exception. I took these offending .jpgs, changed the extension to .psd. The opened in PS no problem, flattened them, re-saved as jpgs... Bob's yer uncle.

Thank!