Two or three picture folders are missing from the hard drive. I have performed every search task including undelete programs without success. The folders are not in the Recycle Bin and were never deleted (not intentionally anyway). Is there anything I can do without spending large amounts of money on technicians without any guarantee of recovery? I will be grateful if you can give me some advice in this matter.

Missing Folders

The other day, I accidentally dragged and dropped a folder into another folder, which made it seem as if the folder had disappeared. I'm wondering if something like this may have happened to you. With that in mind, let's see if we can't find the photo folders before moving on to data recovery tools.

If you know the name of any of the missing file names within the folders, then that would be helpful though I understand it's difficult to remember. But if you have a general idea, we can use that. For example, if the photos are Christmas photos, and you think you might have named them with a descriptive name such as "Christmas 2008" we can do a wildcard search for files containing the word "Christmas."

Open Windows Explorer by right-clicking the Start button and choosing Explore. Now, click on the main drive (this tells Windows where to search) before entering your search term in the Search box. In the example above, type in: *Christmas*.jpg

The asterisks are wildcard characters while the .jpg is the file extension most commonly used for photos. With this particular term, jpg photo files containing the word Christmas will be listed such as "kidsChristmaspics.jpg" or "Christmas003.jpg." Any results will be displayed along with the path to the folder where the file is located.

Check the Search Tools settings of Explorer to make sure that all subfolders are being searched as well. To make this adjustment, click Search Tools > Search Options and make the selection.

Using Windows Photo Gallery to Find Lost Photos

If you have Windows Vista, then you can use Windows Photo Gallery to sort photos and find lost photos. If the original photo folder has been moved to a subfolder, you will be able to find the photos themselves and then determine the path and their location based on the date the photos were taken.

For example, if you know that the missing photos are from your summer trip to Italy in 2007, go into Windows Photo Gallery and scroll down the left side pane until you get to the Date Taken section. You'll see a list of years. Click the year in question and it will expand to show the months. In the main pane, you'll see thumbnails of the corresponding photos. In this example, you'd click on 2007 and then start browsing through the summer months until you find your Italian vacation photos.

Once you find one of the missing photos, right-click it and choose Properties. From there, you can view the exact folder location.

Using Data Recovery Tools

The above two options assumed that the folders have been moved rather than deleted. If you still cannot find the photo folders and believe that they have indeed been deleted, then a data recovery program might help. We recommend Data Recovery from Paretologic for two reasons: it's effective and it includes a free scan that lets you see if the folder is recoverable before you have to buy the product. Download the free data recovery scan tool and let it run. This tool categorizes deleted files by type, so look under the Photo section to see if your lost photo folders have been found. If so, then you can purchase the product for about $40 or $50 (depending on which version you choose) and recover the photos.

Celeste Stewart | March 23rd, 2009
Tags: Data Recovery, picture recovery, recover missing photo folders, recover photos, recover pictures
Categories: Data Recovery

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