some of my digital photos have disappeared from my folders!

Kate253

I have photos on my laptop going back to 2010, hundreds all nicely sorted in folders by years/ occasions etc. I've just discovered that my holiday photos from 2013 have vamoosed. These were really precious as of an extensive road trip in USA that my OH and I did. I seem to have EVERYTHING else, those that went before and after. WTF! Where did they go? I have trawled any folders from around that time to see if they snuck in and bar trawling through every single folder for 6 yrs ( i have loads) I don't know what else to do but how did I lose this folder? I am the queen over over duplicating photos as when I upload from camera , they often double up for some reason so this is unusual. All photos appear to jpeg. It has been the same camera from 2012 to now. Photos lost were 2013.

ItHurtsWhenIP

You don't mention having used the windows search feature to scan the entire hard drive, in case of accidental "moving" of the folder to another "odd" location on the disk. If you haven't done so, try that first.

If there is still no sign, use Recuva (that link is to the portable version that doesn't need installation) to see if the folder was deleted and might be recoverable.

bonzodog2

Try the Previous versions tab on the properties sheet for the folder.

Are we to guess that you only have these photos on your laptop? Valuable files should be copied to other disks and/or cloud storage. Your hard disk can and will fail eventually.
What would you do in case of dropping it/house fire/burglary etc?

mordeith

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

You don't mention having used the windows search feature to scan the entire hard drive

As suggested do a windows search and constrain to items of file extension .jpg and created in 2013 and search entire computer

bigtimecharlie

Has the volume of the drive dropped recently suggesting that the folder was deleted?

Or if the volume is much the same, then the folder was moved by accident. This happened me before, took alot of looking and searching, but eventually found it.

Kate253

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Try the Previous versions tab on the properties sheet for the folder.

Are we to guess that you only have these photos on your laptop? Valuable files should be copied to other disks and/or cloud storage. Your hard disk can and will fail eventually.
What would you do in case of dropping it/house fire/burglary etc?

Sounds odd yes but have photos saved to portable hard drive but now wondering if this folder was missing before I did that.

bonzodog2

Do you rename the files, or do you leave them as the camera names them? e.g. IMG0012345.jpg or DSC567467637.jpg etc. If you can guess what the numeric part might be, you could search the entire drive from the command prompt like:
>cd "myphotostoplevelfolder"
>dir dsc00123*.jpg /s

Alanstrainor

OP, this is the kind of scare that shows you need to consider backing up your photos and files. I use Amazon Prime to store all my photos online. So if my hard drive fails, or my laptop gets stolen, house burns down etc etc, I will have all my photos available.

I suggest you consider doing similar. The best solution is to have your photos stored on your computer/laptop & on an external hard drive & in the cloud.

If laptop fails, you have external. If the external fails, you have the laptop. If you lose both laptop and external you have the cloud.

Did you look in the recyle nin?

riclad

https://www.piriform.com/recuva
download this do a full scan ,
You can also search for image files, jpeg ,etc
It ,ll show a list of files jpeg 1,2 ,3 4,
green icon means it can be recovered .
Click on each file you want recovered .
60gig drive takes 3 hours for a full scan .It looks for files that have been
deleted .
or just scan for image files .You may have to rename files ,
or you will have a folder ,jpeg 1-1000 plus ,jpeg 57, jpeg 58 etc restored by recuva .
restore to a new folder holiday pics dec.
And you ,ll need free space for the new restored files .
google drive gives 6gig plus free space ,upload the photos or copy em to a usb drive.
At some point your laptop drive will stop working .And all photos will be gone.
300gig usb drive is cheap to buy .

readytosnap

Plus they could be just "hidden" following a recent update?

riclad

if Windows deletes files the file is still there on the drive ,unless you overwrite it .
Don,t save any data to the drive before you do the scan .do not download
anything apart from recuva file.

Atlantic Dawn

Any other users of the laptop that could have deleted them?

riclad

Why would someone just delete one folder.the images are still there unless
the drive is full and the files are overwritten.
is the folder still there ,h
Holiday pics 2013, but it appears empty.