Lost photos

[Dan Gerous]

I have a folder named photos that I put all my pics into and leave them till I get time to sort them out. About a year ago this folder had hundreds of pics in it and I decided to use sub folders to tidy them up a bit. A short while later I needed some of them for a Camera club night, I went into the folder and the whole lot were gone. I know I didn't delete them, but I downloaded recovery software and gave it a go anyway. Needless to say none of the missing pics were recovered. I am assuming they are still in the computer somewhere. I have tried the search function to locate them but no joy there either. They were all in a folder named photos, and all with file names starting with DSCF or IMG then four numbers, but as I said I cannot locate them using those file names. Anyone got any ideas on how to locate them?

[Tarq57]

Where on the drive was this folder? On the desktop? Or another sub-folder of the "c" drive? Do you know the path?

Is it possible you are looking for them on a different user account from that the folder was created using?

[11Fan]

Not an expert, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

It's the long way to go about it, but I've used this in the past and it worked, on Excel, Word and Picture files.

I don't know what OS you are using, but somewhere on your desktop, there is a Search function. On Windows Vista, select the ""Start" Icon and it's right there above the button. On Windows XP, hit Start and select Search.

Then I put one of the following and hit enter:

*.jpg or *.jpeg
*.png
*.gif
*.tif or *.tiff

The * is a wild card. Don't know what extension the pictures are, but jpeg's are fairly common.

It's going to look for everything, at least on the user ID you are on, as Tarq57 suggested.

You can suspend the search as soon as you spot one of them. Then just select the picture, right click, select Properties and it should display where the picture is located.

Good luck.

[vulcanised]

Another (oddball) way to do it might be to install Picasa, assuming it's not already on board.

It has a knack of searching out all pictures on the HDD, even some you've forgotten were there.

[Loose rivets]

Are the sub folders still showing, albeit empty?

If NO: Is there anything in the Operating system that might be refusing to let you see these sub folders? i.e. Have you tried revealing hidden files and folders - just in case?


I'm assuming you looked in the bin! Yes, course you did.

[MJC2]

Another option - search using Ubuntu from CD drive

Earlier posters have covered many of the options.

But another way would be to set PC to boot first from CD drive, insert Live Linux/ubuntu CD into drive, and reboot.

After a bit of a wait - say 5 to 10 mins? - you could then search across the whole hard disc using eg *.j*

Advantages: would cover all Windows users, hidden files, system files, etc etc.

Cost: £4 to £6 for a Linux magazine with a live CD, plus a bit of time.

Using Ubuntu from a live CD really is easy - just click on Places and choose search. You will not be loading a new OS - everything runs from the CD (as long as you do not click Install of course!)

Best of luck Mike

[flying lid]

11Fan's method works - same happened to me yonks ago.

Been said many, many times, but BACKUP all your files, photos etc. I have two portable USB hard drives, very cheap these days. One is permanently plugged into my computer, one used as portable device.

Good luck with your search.

Lid

[Dan Gerous]

Thanks for the help. 11Fan, thats a nice tip. I tried that and got lots of images up that were removed, and I thought I had the missing files for a moment, but it wasn't to be. Of course I should have saved them to the external drive. This wasn't the first time this has happened to me, and I have for many years been backing my aircraft pics to an external drive, I just never seemed to get round to doing everything else. I will just have to accept that they are lost. It's annoying, as I had some nice pics that I was intending to use for camera club competitions. Just spent the last two days getting rid of the junk from my files, and putting the rest on the external drive.

Thanks again
Danny

[Tinstaafl]

Download Photorec. It does a good job of finding lost images. You could download, extract it & run it directly but as a general rule with data recovery you shouldn't use the affected disk for anything. Better to download a boot CD image to another PC, burn the CD and then boot the affected machine from the CD to run the data recovery tool(s). Also save the recovered files to a different disk to avoid overwriting files yet to be recovered.

[green granite]

Probably a long shot but have you used the camera memory card(s) since? If not you might be able to recover some of the pictures from them even if you've deleted them.

[FullOppositeRudder]

Probably a long shot but have you used the camera memory card(s) since? If not you might be able to recover some of the pictures from them even if you've deleted them.

That's a very good point.

With memory cards at the low prices they are these days, especially when compared with what I / we used to pay for 36 Kodachrome slides 40 years ago, I find it almost as easy to start with a new card when the current one is full.

The problem is keeping track of the little beggars - and their identity. They are very easily lost in the bottom of the gadget bag, or some compartment thereof. I swear that there are still secret pockets in my Lowepros that I have yet to discover.

I never had that problem with a roll of 120 format FP4 in the days of yore ...

Whoops - this is not a photography forum is it ...... Back then to computers.

regards,
FOR

[CYPR]

I have used Recuva for a couple of years to locate both photographs and documents that I have deleted, this program will in all probability solve your problem.

Good luck

http://www.piriform.com/recuva