Missing Pictures

[alyjordan]

I have downloaded thousands of pictures over the past year. They are
organized by month and each folder contains several hundred pictures.
There is plenty of room still on my hard drive, so I don't think that
memory space is an issue (50 GB used; 93 GB free)

Today, when I was looking through the pictures, I realized that from
the most recent 4 folders, there are big sections of pictures missing.
There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. When I try to open them,
I can see their properties (i.e., 1.2 mb, date taken, etc.), but cannot
see either a preview or the actual image itself.

One thing I did notice when trying do some very basic troubleshooting
myself is that when I opened Properties and tried to look at the
summary - in pictures where I can see the image - then the general
summary is available for me. In pictures where I can no longer see the
image (though the thumbnail icon is still there with the title of the
picture and the properties, as noted above), in those pictures, I
cannot see any general summary and do not have access to edit the
general summary.

Does anybody have any ideas about what has happened to these pictures?
I have got to believe that they are still on my hard drive somewhere
(and no, sadly, I do not have these pictures backed up).

Help!!

 

[DatabaseBen]

well,
it should be understood that
picture technology can be used
to encode virus's into them. For
example a nice pic that can
be printed could be a small as
200k. But if that pic comes in
a file that is 6 megs, then there
is secret encoding in it.

The above may or may not be
the case, but it is a possibility.
And if it is then the antivirals
did some cleaning for you.

have you tried to view them
via safe mode? have you used
a chkdsk lately?

if neither
have been successful, you
might want to tryout out a
pic undelete program. there are
some freeones, but basically any
one will search and show you
if they are viewable. restoring
them is dependent on the software.