I was going through old pics from 1990, and noticed that some of them are degrading- no longer opening or only opening part way. If I were to upload my pics, erase them from the thumb drive they were copied to, and redownload them to a new drive, would that stop the degradation? Moving them to a new drive hasn’t helped.
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Unfortunately, it’s unlikely. Since you’d be copying the already degraded version.
There might be software to help restore them? I’ve never looked into that before. But such a thing might exist. 
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Here are some ideas. Hope you find something…
A tutorial if you use Photoshop:
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/discover/old-photo-restoration.html
Unfortunately PS is expensive. But Gimp is not. Here are a few tutorials:
I used to use PS for work; always Gimp for home and with good results. The only problem is these are time consuming approaches. I searched and found a couple AI based tools below
For JPEG or damaged files, here is an article to some s/w that is supposed to do the trick:
And lastly…
For a free (as in speech, not beer) here is an Open Source multiple OS alternative:
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A goldmine. Thank you. These photos aren’t on paper, they’re on a jump drive, so half of the pic will load, and the rest is a solid color like beige. I’ll try techradar and PhotoRec for those.
The rest are super old, but haven’t begun degrading, yet. I was planning on removing degraded pics and hoping to rescue the rest from their age before they start degrading. Some of them are coloring book pages I scanned, family photos I scanned, others are art I found on the internet 30 years ago, gifs I enjoyed at the time, or someone else’s screenshots with info I needed to write out and didn’t get to yet. Some are theme pieces, icons, cursors, pics which could be used to create jigsaw puzzles, etc.
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Hi @georgia!
Apologies, I don’t have anything to add other than my support- I think Katerina and Korvo have the right idea with the photo restoring software. It looks like there are some amazing digital tools out there! I hope you can find a way to restore your photos. Wishing you good luck! 
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