I'm sorry, Dave. I cannot show you these images.

Were they by any chance in CMYK color format? Try opening them in Photoshop, converting to RGB, and saving. A Google of https://www.google.com/search?q=why+won%27t+ie8+display+jpg&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a gave some promising info along these lines. http://social.expression.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/web/thread/17ec253f-aac5-4598-a47a-a6ff8affbf3b, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1204288/jpeg-shows-in-firefox-but-not-ie8. If that is the problem, there seems to be a way to batch convert them using ImageMagick.

http://www.irfanview.com has some advanced image information, as well as some batch conversion tools that may help you.

Seconding IrFanView to open the images and resave them as JPGs. It's lighting fast in its batch conversions.

For getting image info, the imagemagick tools include one called "identify" that is probably as good as anything. You can download them http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows. You can easily save the output using:identify -verbose file.jpg > fileinfo.txtHowever, I think you may be hitting a problem I ran into with large images - IE will run out of memory and just flat out refuse to load some images (red X or sometimes a missing image entirely). In our case we had maybe 10 extremely large images [approx 10,000 x 2,000) on each page, and after viewing a lot of these pages it would randomly start to fail to load some images - restarting IE would make the exact same page work fine. It never crashed and the more sane sized images would always load ok - just some of the huge ones would fail to load at random. So to eliminate that, when an image fails to load try restarting the browser and loading it again. (we fixed this by replacing the images with thumbnails and only showing one huge image at a time). If that's not it, and you can find an image the reliably breaks IE8 then you could always post a sample - friendly Mefites will probably be able to spot the problem quickly (or feel free to mefimail me in confidence).

It's a bear, but my go-to for this sort of thing is http://www.imagemagick.org/. The http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php might help. It's command line only afaik, but if you or someone else is proficient with this sort of thing, it might be useful for converting them all to a single format (which is convert's primary purpose in life) or to see if you can get convert (or any of the other tools) to spit out some relevant metadata that might help you figure out what's different about those particular images. More usage details http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-processing.php. I'd try converting them all to one format, or converting from whatever they're in to BMP and back into something specific. That'll force a full re-encode which might be productive. There are other convert flags for messing with color depth and various encoding details that might also be useful. It'll do batch conversion pretty easily, as you can see in the docs.

On post, yeah, samj has good advice too. I'd forgotten about identify. Definitely give that a shot! But in terms of repair, I think your best bet will be in convert. Unless, ofc, the problem is the size. That's definitely another plausible explanation.

just because FF/Chrome display them fine doesn't mean it's not a problem with the images. we had a problem like that in the IE6/IE7 period - I don't remember the exact details but one version of IE refused to show some images. IIRC, the problem turned out to be thumbnails embedded in a format that one version of IE didn't like. I'm assuming that isn't your exact problem, but confirming whether the images load fine directly from a flash drive will help narrow down whose problem this is to fix. one other thing that made troubleshooting our issue difficult was that after loading a "broken" image, all JPEG image rendering would be flaky until a reboot. once we realized this the situation became deterministic and much easier to diagnose.

From the OP:We found that the images themselves are fine, but still created smaller versions to test their behavior. These also all tested as fine. With the smaller images, IE would always display the first 10 or 12 images that were opened, and would begin failing to display them in different ways after that. This failure was not dependent on the images at all--testing a list of images in the same order, closing and reopening the browser each time, would cause fairly consistent results: IE got flaky around picture 11 or 13. But testing that same list of images from the bottom up would cause the last 10 or 12 to work and all the rest to fail. Testing them in a random order would cause different behavior yet again. After looking into it a fair amount and trying several possible solutions, none of which worked, we determined that the odd behavior we were seeing was a fundamental flaw in IE. We're using this system in a workplace where we have a fair amount of control over the machines, which cannot be upgraded to IE 9, so we changed the default browser on those machines. Of course we still have no control over what browser our customers use, but IE 9 can handle dozens of the images in a row, so maybe eventually the issue will be mooted. Given that IE 9 still has bugs I wrote about when IE 5 was new, that's a minor miracle.