What Happened to My Photographic Image Files? They're Gone!

Riverwalk, San Antonio, TX

www.dennismook.com

The other day I was performing some final preparation of a large number of images to send off to the stock photo agency with whom I have a contract.  As I was reviewing my images, one by one, I realized that several images I had made were not in the "collection" I had designated in Lightroom.  So, I went back to the original file folders in which the images should have been and they were not there either.  What?  Where are they?  What happened to them?  I had seen them a couple of weeks earlier and I had even uploaded one of them to this blog for a post while on our The Great American Road Trip (TGART).  Where the heck were they?

I started with the basics and did a full computer search to ascertain if they somehow had gotten misfiled.  As I keep all my photographic files and Lightroom catalog on a second internal hard drive, I searched both the F drive (where the images reside) and the C drive.  No luck.  I then looked at the drive in which I back up my images as they are imported.  Not there either.  Nor on the second backup drive which I use to back up all my data nightly.  No where to be found.  What the heck happened to them.

The next step was to get out my two, small external USB 3.0 hard drives that I take when I travel.  I use one as the Lightroom catalog drive as well as put my images on it instead of the laptop.   The other is used as the second drive when I import my images into Lightroom on my laptop.  I had already deleted all the images on both drives, but I was confident I had a program that would recover them.  The recovery program worked well but the images I knew I took (they were made in San Antonio, Texas) weren't on either drive!  What?  Now this was getting "curiouser and curiouser!"

Since, when I travel, I made a third copy of my images on my laptop's hard drive, I brought that out, turned it on and looked on that drive.  No where to be found.

Canola Field, Oklahoma

To recap, I made the images in San Antonio of the Riverwalk, the Alamo and some blossoming cactus plants.  I had loaded them into my Lightroom catalog on my laptop and uploaded a couple to this blog--so I knew they were there--evidently, at one time.  I went back and cannot find those particular images anywhere that I had stored them.  It was like I had never taken them.

One more thing to try.  After I return from using my gear, the first thing I do is transfer the images I made to Lightroom and a backup to another hard drive.  I never remove the images from the memory cards until I know I have them in at least 2 places.  Then, I always reset all the dials and clean everything before putting it away and, at the same time, reformatting my memory cards in the camera.  That is what I had done with these.  Since returning from the road trip, I had not used my Nikon D800E, I had picked up my Olympus E-M5 for the images I have been taking locally.  So, my last chance was to see if the recovery software could resurrect the images from the memory cards AFTER they had ben reformatted.  To end the suspense, they did, indeed!  I found them on the card.  In fact the recovery software recovered every image.  None were missing on the entire card.  Whew!  Finally.  I then transferred them from the card to my computer and then placed them in the correct folder in Lightroom.  Afterwards, I picked several to send to the stock agency.  What a mess!

I still can't figure out what in the world happened to those several images.  All the other images of the 3600 or so I made were in Lightroom.  Only those few were not.  I have no idea what happened to them.  Maybe zombie Canon users!  LOL

The program that worked brilliantly is called Recuva.  I can highly recommend it and it is free.  I know I will never be without it.  Thank you Recuva!

Thanks for looking.

Enjoy!
Dennis Mook