Solved JPG and DNG files not showing images

Win 11 Pro....I had a major disaster....I accidently deleted about 5000 photos of many subjects taken over many years.......I thought they were backed up on Google Photos....but alas and alak....they were not.....

Several iterations of various data recovery programs....(File Scavanger was the most successful)......I have been able to restore about half of my photos.....I put the restored files on a separate SATA drive....and mounted it in my W11 box.....

When I open the photos drive (H: in this case).......I see icons for the photos.....I do not see any of the images themselves......this is for both JPG and DNG files.....Right now I am using
Picassa Photo Viewer to open the files and see the content......BUT the content is NOT visible UNLESS I open them in Picassa....or some other photo viewer application....I use Picassa Photo Viewer because I'm used to it......

So question is......How can I make the file icon show the actual photo content of the file...without having to "open" the file in some photo viewer....????

Hope I made this "understandable".....
Many thanks
Steve

is this of any help.

or this

best of luck, Steve ..

Wow....this is really a problem.....I follow both of your advice....I went thru all the options including the section on group policy and NOTHING worked......
The default policy is to show thumbnails rather than icons.....and icons is all I got.....

Gonna keep digging but I suspect that something happened to the files when I accidently deleted them.......perhaps something in each file attributes got turned off or something....

Thanks guys....appreciate your input....
Steve

stevem5000 said:

Wow....this is really a problem.....I follow both of your advice....I went thru all the options including the section on group policy and NOTHING worked......
The default policy is to show thumbnails rather than icons.....and icons is all I got.....

Gonna keep digging but I suspect that something happened to the files when I accidently deleted them.......perhaps something in each file attributes got turned off or something....

Thanks guys....appreciate your input....
Steve

Click to expand...

You probably only recovered the cache thumbnails (.png or .jpg) from the previously deleted files and not the full-size iteration of the images.
(Some picture viewers do create small thumbnails rather than relying solely on cached data from MS)
This is why you are only seeing icon size images.

OAT said:

You probably only recovered the cache thumbnails (.png or .jpg) from the previously deleted files and not the full-size iteration of the images.
(Some picture viewers do create small thumbnails rather than relying solely on cached data from MS)
This is why you are only seeing icon size images.

Click to expand...

If you save a picture and give it another name does it show?

Winuser.....If I open a dng file and close it with a different name.....nothing changes...Still cannot see the thumbnail.....
So I gotta bite the bullet......Open them up one at a time to see what I have to work with.....

Many vacation photos.....about 4000 that I shot in Guatamala a few years ago......kids growing up movies converted from Super 8 film....Big loss....
Thanks for your input...
Steve

stevem5000 said:

Winuser.....If I open a dng file and close it with a different name.....nothing changes...Still cannot see the thumbnail.....
So I gotta bite the bullet......Open them up one at a time to see what I have to work with.....

Many vacation photos.....about 4000 that I shot in Guatamala a few years ago......kids growing up movies converted from Super 8 film....Big loss....
Thanks for your input...
Steve

Click to expand...

Try opening the picture with a program such as Paint and choose save as. If it works it'll be time consuming so I would only do the ones that I really want to fix. I don't know if any editing programs would do group renaming.

XnView (free) can do batch rename and other batch processing as well.

Take one JPG and use Xnview or similar to convert it to say JPEG or PNG and see if the thumbnail now shows.
If so, batch convert them all.
Are the JPG's showing decent size? ie say 10kb or more, not a 1kb thumbnail.
As mentioned, you may have unfortunately only recovered the thumbnail cache. Been there.
Data recovery is an option if you have the $$$.
Have you tried clearing the thumbnail cache via disk cleanup?

it maybe worthwhile rebuilding the icon cache. then see if the changes to explorer are working.

best of luck, Steve ..

This may help. Will preload all thumbnails.

Last night I moved about 5 JPG's to a flash drive......then went to a W10 box.....and opened those files in Photoshop and did a save as with another name......
The thumbnails did NOT show in the W10 box.......Moved everything back to my W11 box and still no thumbnails.....Have not tried the WinThumbs preloader yet.......later today......It seems the the file sizes for my jpeg's is running around 2.5 Mb.......and my Photoshop files are averaging around 4 Mb in size.......so it appears that the file size is normal according to what I have been seeing in the past......

I did data recovery....used 4 different programs but got the best recovery with File Scavanger which I've used several times in the past years.....

And this morning I used Everything to scan for MP4 files and it found a bunch of stuff....couple hundred at least......they are all opening in VLC....
Right now I am copying all the files to a new SATA drive......

Work on it some more this afternoon and tonight....

Thanks for sticking with me....
Steve

I know how it feels. A couple of months ago I accidentally deleted some .mp4 files. I was able to restore them using MiniTool Data Recovery. Going by the file size I thought they were recovered. When I tried to play them, none of my media players would play them. I wound up re-encoding them again. The good thing was that I only had to waste about 3 hours of my time to encode them again.

When I said data recovery, I meant sending the drive off to a data recovery specialist (hence the $$$ reference), rather than using shareware.

Try upping a JPG here:

and did a save as with another name

Click to expand...

Do you mean you CONVERTED the file type or just renamed it ?

I went thru all the threads on recovering thumbnails / restoring casche including the bat file...etc....nothing worked.....
So I am stuck with opening each file one at a time to see what's on it then giving it a meaningful tittle....
I used Everything to scan for JPG...DNG....MOV....MP4 and I got lot's of stuff....probably a couple thousand files.....
I have gone thru most of my MP4 and DNG files....opened them and renamed them.......out of several hundred files of those 2 types I had maybe
50-60 bad files that would not open.........About 3/4 of the files are DNG and JPG files and I have a LOT more of them that are bad.....I gotta delete those and open and rename the others......this is gonna take a couple weeks......if not longer....

Someone commented about going to a commercial recovery company........I did consider it........with the amount of files to recover the cost would be
around $1500 or so......a definite hit on the pocketbook .....but I used File Scavanger which is not a shareware....I paid about $60 for it a few years ago and it did a pretty good job....I also used Mini Tool Recovery...EaseUS.... Of the 3 data recovery programs File Scavanger was far and wide the most effective....
And I bought Kernal Photo Repair which is supposed to repair Icons and return the Thumbnail.....did not work....

In other areas I learned my lesson on backups.......I now have I Drive for backups...I got the 10 Tb plan and am backing up 3 computers to it daily....
And I'm in the process of setting up a NAS box with 2 - 16 Tb drives in RAID 1 .....

Allow me a moment to thank EVERYONE who posted helpful advice and suggestions.....I really appreciate your assistance.....

No need to respond to this......help some other poor fool who did not have proper backups....:):)

Many thanks
Steve

@stevem5000, Going by my memory (that can be dangerous ) I'm thinking that years ago when a file was deleted, only the first character was removed and that caused the OS to mark that space as free space. I also seem to remember that from DOS one could just add the missing character back to the file name. If that still is what happens, I wonder why it's so hard to successfully restore deleted files from a drive that wasn't written too.

You are correct on the deleted first character of a file name....no windows cannot find the file.......Now...I agree with you in that WHY should the files be so hard to recover......I suspect there is something else that happens to the file to make it hard to recover.....

The problem is MOST of my jpg's and are correctly named.....and when I tried to change the name there was no difference.......next I'm gonna open a file in Photoshop and save it as something else....see if that makes a difference......and I'm gonna play around with the links a couple other guys gave that on my initial try did not help.....but singe these are tools I'm not familiar with....maybe I didn;'t set things up correctly......

THIS............is the "never ending story"..............:):)

stevem5000 said:

The problem is MOST of my jpg's and are correctly named.....and when I tried to change the name there was no difference.

Click to expand...

It's possible that you may have to change the file to another format. For example change from a .jpg to a .bmp file.

I'm going to try that.....tomorrow / next day.......gotta take care of some other stuff first...

have a look at a Irfanview it can do wonderful things to images including thumbnails.
i also believe it can batch file them as well and its free.

best of luck, Steve ..