My Pictures Problem

[Guest]

My sister jsut gave me her PC and she is telling me that she turned her PC on
and now all the pictures in her My Pictures folder are very small. They are
all only 2 KB in size and everyone has been renamed with a ~ in front. An
example is ~627910d49f0311c6.jpg
I have asked her what she did so I can try and trouble shoot this but she
says she did nothing. I tried a system restore and had no luck.
Does anyone have any suggestions how I may be able to get the pictures back
to their original sizes?

thanks

 

[Bogey Man]

My sister jsut gave me her PC and she is telling me that she turned her PC
on
and now all the pictures in her My Pictures folder are very small. They
are
all only 2 KB in size and everyone has been renamed with a ~ in front. An
example is ~627910d49f0311c6.jpg
I have asked her what she did so I can try and trouble shoot this but she
says she did nothing. I tried a system restore and had no luck.
Does anyone have any suggestions how I may be able to get the pictures
back
to their original sizes?

thanks

The file names that start with "~" are in my limited experience, temporary
files. Try doing a search for *.jpg and see what you get.

 

[RalfG]

Just turning on the computer wouldn't have done that. Something that was
done/happened prior to that has changed or moved the picture files. If the
original copies of the picture files were actually resized then there is no
way to change them back. It isn't just a matter of physical dimensions, all
of the image data from the larger files is gone. If the pictures were only
moved to some other folder on the drive, hidden, or renamed, you should be
able to find them again by searching. In the Explorer
menu -Tools-Options-View- change the settings to show Hidden files and
folders. Check the recycle bin too, just in case. There are also some "file
recovery" tools that you can get (download or buy) to recover deleted files
that aren't in the recycle bin. The sooner after the incident that you run
the file recovery, the better the chance of getting at least some of the
deleted files back intact.

Scan the computer for malware. Her own antivirus program could be infected
so scan using an AV on CD disc or diskette, or scan using one of the free
online AV scanners, like Trend Micro's Housecall.