Missing Pictures?

[sallylynn812]

I transfered pictures on to my harddrive a couple weeks ago. Now the folder is empty and I have no idea when this happened! I had SO MANY pictures in there from a recent vacation!

I actually was showing them to someone last Thursday!

They are not in my trash which has much older files in it.
I did a search of my hard drive - (all my camera pictures are named p8xxxx) and nothing within the date range I'm looking for comes up!

What happened to them and how do I get them back!!! I'll cry if I don't have those pictures!!!

 

[aziatiklover]

get a recover software and run it on that specific HDD and see if you can get them back!

 

[mainstay]

This is supposed to be good and I've been holding onto the link in case this sort of thing comes up on my end:

http://www.cleverfiles.com/

Could they be hidden?

Also, are they still on the camera card?

Even if you've formatted the card and only taken a few pictures, chances are, they are still readily retrievable.

Once this issue gets resolved, your next question should be "how did they get deleted?" (drive issues?, 2 year old get their hands on it? 16 year old get their hands on it? too much to drink Friday night? j/k) and then "how do I prevent this from happening again" (backup strategy).

 

[sallylynn812]

get a recover software and run it on that specific HDD and see if you can get them back!

Know of any free ones?

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This is supposed to be good and I've been holding onto the link in case this sort of thing comes up on my end:

http://www.cleverfiles.com/

Could they be hidden?

Also, are they still on the camera card?

Even if you've formatted the card and only taken a few pictures, chances are, they are still readily retrievable.

Once this issue gets resolved, your next question should be "how did they get deleted?" (drive issues?, 2 year old get their hands on it? 16 year old get their hands on it? too much to drink Friday night? j/k) and then "how do I prevent this from happening again" (backup strategy).

If they are hidden, how do I fix that or figure that out?

My camera was full when I transfered the pictures, and I have since taken enough pictures to fill half the card again.

I can not think of what happened to them. My 2 yr old doesn't get a hold of my computer. I just had the folder open the other day, and I remember that I left the folder open after showing my friend the pictures because I wanted to edit them and put some on facebook, but I got lazy and closed the folder and it hasn't been touched since.

On my PC, my daughter got a hold of my camera onetime and formated it and in the process of trying to recover them from my camera I got a virus on my PC so bad that I had to take it to a computer store to fix it!
I have an external that I backup on but don't do it often enough and certainly not since I took the pictures I'm missing.

 

[brdeveloper]

I transfered pictures on to my harddrive a couple weeks ago. Now the folder is empty and I have no idea when this happened! I had SO MANY pictures in there from a recent vacation!

I actually was showing them to someone last Thursday!

They are not in my trash which has much older files in it.
I did a search of my hard drive - (all my camera pictures are named p8xxxx) and nothing within the date range I'm looking for comes up!

What happened to them and how do I get them back!!! I'll cry if I don't have those pictures!!!

Finder on OSX 10.6 is its most outdated aspect. It doesn't show a lot of information about files and folders like in Windows Explorer. The only way to cut files if by dragging it to the correct folder. You can't show hidden files and folders but instead you have to click on "Go->Go to folder". There is no empty spaces on the right panel so you right-click it and create an item inside. Instead, you have to enter that folder and browse into menus to create some items. Folders and standard files are not separated like in Windows Explorer. You can't order search results by size like Windows does.

Recently, I've lost a bunch of files after an unsuccessful partitioning (I wasn't aware that Bootcamp doesn't supported WinXP SP1) so I proceeded to run Photorec utility. As it has found a lot of small system images, ordering results by size would be a nice help for finding useful image files (usually bigger ones).

In short, my guess is that you accidentally moved your images' folder inside another one. Try making a filtered search (like .jpg, .pef, .nef, etc) into your entire filesystem. If you think your files were accidentally deleted, I recommend Photorec open source utility (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec). As it doesn't list recovered files "a priori" an instead it recovers all deleted files, make sure you have a lot of free space which can fit all of your deleted files. Also, use a external disk as Photorec could overwrite deleted (and recoverable) pictures with recovered ones.

 

[sallylynn812]

Finder on OSX 10.6 is its most outdated aspect. It doesn't show a lot of information about files and folders like in Windows Explorer. The only way to cut files if by dragging it to the correct folder. You can't show hidden files and folders but instead you have to click on "Go->Go to folder". There is no empty spaces on the right panel so you right-click it and create an item inside. Instead, you have to enter that folder and browse into menus to create some items. Folders and standard files are not separated like in Windows Explorer. You can't order search results by size like Windows does.

Recently, I've lost a bunch of files after an unsuccessful partitioning (I wasn't aware that Bootcamp doesn't supported WinXP SP1) so I proceeded to run Photorec utility. As it has found a lot of small system images, ordering results by size would be a nice help for finding useful image files (usually bigger ones).

In short, my guess is that you accidentally moved your images' folder inside another one. Try making a filtered search (like .jpg, .pef, .nef, etc) into your entire filesystem. If you think your files were accidentally deleted, I recommend Photorec open source utility (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec). As it doesn't list recovered files "a priori" an instead it recovers all deleted files, make sure you have a lot of free space which can fit all of your deleted files. Also, use a external disk as Photorec could overwrite deleted (and recoverable) pictures with recovered ones.

I did a search of the mac HD for the term "p8" and ordered them by date and all my photos prior to what I'm looking for come up. Even if I choose just images to search for.

Trying a couple photo recovery programs but they take hours to search the whole harddrive, and if it finds the photos i have to pay 40-80 dollars to recover them.
I don't want to risk losing more photos so I don't know about what you suggested.

 

[mainstay]

Not trying to be an ass here, but I have been in the situation where I've lost family photo's and am STILL gritting my teeth about it 10 years later.

If these are important, and you have exhausted all of the things that you feel COMFORTABLE doing, and are looking to get these pictures back, you may want to consider calling a local computer company for support.

Yes, it may cost money (get a quote) or maybe they will take a free look. But if I could pay a $100 to have those photo's back, I would reach for my wallet in a heart beat.

 

[sallylynn812]

Not trying to be an ass here, but I have been in the situation where I've lost family photo's and am STILL gritting my teeth about it 10 years later.

If these are important, and you have exhausted all of the things that you feel COMFORTABLE doing, and are looking to get these pictures back, you may want to consider calling a local computer company for support.

Yes, it may cost money (get a quote) or maybe they will take a free look. But if I could pay a $100 to have those photo's back, I would reach for my wallet in a heart beat.

Photos mean a lot to me. There were some 'important' ones on there. Photos of my 2 year old with her Nana, and her grampy, of my husbands old dog that we got to see after we had to give her away 3 years ago, family. A great vacation that I want to show my daughter some day.

I hope one of these programs finds them, and I hope it's the 40 dollar one. My husband will just have to understand how much they mean to me, cause I know he won't be happy to pay that money.

 

[brdeveloper]

Photorec is free and after testing some paid ones, I find that most looks like they are based on Photorec's engine, although they have a more friendly interface. If you download two or three of these utilities, you'll see that most look the same.

 

[Jolly Jimmy]

I hope you recover your photos. But for any important data you should have at least one backup otherwise you will lose it all some day when your hard drive fails, or to theft, fire, accidents,...

 

[sallylynn812]

Photorec is free and after testing some paid ones, I find that most looks like they are based on Photorec's engine, although they have a more friendly interface. If you download two or three of these utilities, you'll see that most look the same.

Well I went to download but I don't see an install or anything. There are some icons i recognize from when I put pc files on my mac (ie .exe files).

 

[mainstay]

Make sure you choose the Mac OS X Intel (or whichever is appropriate) from the downloads folder... Do not just hit the giant green box to download (sometimes it doesn't properly detect OS).

I am testing this on a local drive here to see how this program works for you.

There is documentation + the program runs in a terminal window.

Looks interesting... but may be outside of your comfort level...

 

[aziatiklover]

Know of any free ones?

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If they are hidden, how do I fix that or figure that out?

My camera was full when I transfered the pictures, and I have since taken enough pictures to fill half the card again.

I can not think of what happened to them. My 2 yr old doesn't get a hold of my computer. I just had the folder open the other day, and I remember that I left the folder open after showing my friend the pictures because I wanted to edit them and put some on facebook, but I got lazy and closed the folder and it hasn't been touched since.

On my PC, my daughter got a hold of my camera onetime and formated it and in the process of trying to recover them from my camera I got a virus on my PC so bad that I had to take it to a computer store to fix it!
I have an external that I backup on but don't do it often enough and certainly not since I took the pictures I'm missing.

Wat I did was download a trial version and u done fix! Don't need to pay for something that u gonna use it couple times. that's me tho.

 

[sallylynn812]

Well I'm using Disk Drill which is finding thousands and thousands of folder in no sort of order or anything. Photos from 2+ years ago are coming up (this mac is a few months old).
I have Stellar Phoenix PhotoRecovery running on my camera and I can't believe what's coming up on that. Really old photos and I saw a couple of the ones I want to recover, but it has to finish to look through all of them, so hopefully that works.

I would love to know what happened to the photos in that folder...

 

[mainstay]

I would love to know what happened to the photos in that folder...

Yeah - that is strange.

Can you give some information on the system?

It is running Lion?

Where is the folder located?

This is under a single profile on the computer or are there other users?

You didn't accidentally mount them from an external drive?

If you put the flash card back in (or camera) they don't magically re-appear, do they?

The fear is that this will happen again.

 

[sallylynn812]

Yeah - that is strange.

Can you give some information on the system?

It is running Lion?

Where is the folder located?

This is under a single profile on the computer or are there other users?

You didn't accidentally mount them from an external drive?

If you put the flash card back in (or camera) they don't magically re-appear, do they?

The fear is that this will happen again.

They are under
users/*me*/pictures/pictures/2011-8-28 - 2011-9-2/

I downloaded them from the camera on the 9-2 I think. Looked at them on the 8th off the hard drive.

Pluggin the camera in didn't make them appear.

I ran the pheonix program on the camera and a HANDFUL of photos were recovered (after paying 40 bucks), but not all of them. I don't have any of her with my dad or her nana. There were some great photos on there. At least I got some back....

Maybe in the future I'll find them to have magically reappeared.

 

[mainstay]

did they get sucked into iPhoto?

OR, call Apple Care Support and say "lion ate my baby" (or, at least pictures of her).

They might be able to work some Apple magic to help you.

It IS only 2 months old.

Aside from that:


Honestly. I would take it to a knowledgeable company and have them give you an estimate / idea of what you're looking at.

I would NOT be installing program after program and hoping to find them. There is the real possibility that the recovery program could be written to the same location as the photo's, thereby making it even more difficult to retrieve.

 

[sallylynn812]

did they get sucked into iPhoto?

OR, call Apple Care Support and say "lion ate my baby" (or, at least pictures of her).

They might be able to work some Apple magic to help you.

It IS only 2 months old.

Aside from that:


Honestly. I would take it to a knowledgeable company and have them give you an estimate / idea of what you're looking at.

I would NOT be installing program after program and hoping to find them. There is the real possibility that the recovery program could be written to the same location as the photo's, thereby making it even more difficult to retrieve.

I guess I could call Apple and see what they say.
I don't use iPhoto and don't see any photos in there.

 

[brdeveloper]

Well I went to download but I don't see an install or anything. There are some icons i recognize from when I put pc files on my mac (ie .exe files).

The program is run from the command-line. I don't remember what steps were needed for running Photorec, but it has some kind of a text-only wizard when you load the app.