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Resolved Question

impoted photos not showing only grey boxes Help!

Sep 7, 2011 7:25PM PDT
Sad I imported photos from SD card (which I have later discoverd seems to be playing up) all the thumnails however show as photos through Picasa3, or Paint or anything else I try to view them with.However when I try to see them as photos they only show as grey boxes help!? I unfortunately deleted the photos as I was importing them so they are no longer on the card!

I have tried looking at them on another computer and the same happens.
Is there anyway I can have full size photos of these thumbnails?

Discussion is locked

townsie77 has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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Re: photos
Sep 7, 2011 7:37PM PDT

Can you try to describe your problem better?

I now read
- you imported photo's from SD card
- they show as photos through Picasa3 or Paint
- but they don't show as photo's if you try to see them as photos

So all I can say: use Picasa3 or Paint to show them as photo's and it's OK.

And you tried on another computer. It was the same. But how could these photos or pictures or thumbnails or whatever you imported ever come into that other computer if you deleted them while importing them on the first computer?

And can you tell what's on the hard disk. The average picture is 1 to 2 megabytes, easily seen in My Computer. Thumbnails are either small (a kilobyte or so) and not separate files (all are included in one file, called thumbs.db).

Kees

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imported photos not showing only grey boxes Help!
Sep 7, 2011 10:51PM PDT

Sorry to be unclear I am not clued up on computers and cameras but will try my best to explain what is happening.

I noticed that a right click on the small thumnail is 36KB does that mean anything?

Yes I imported photos from my camera SD card and copied them to My Pictures folder and also burned them to a cd but when I went to have a look at the full size photo of any of them it came up as a grey square. I took the cd to a shop to have the photos printed but only grey squares showed on the screen.

I checked my cd and looked at my folder on another computer just to check it wasn't my old computer playing up but the same happened.
I fear the problem isn't looking good!

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Re: photo's
Sep 7, 2011 11:11PM PDT

36 kB certainly isn't enough to display or print a full size picture. So whatever happened, something went wrong.

That's why it isn't advised to delete pics from the camera(or the SD card) before you have a proven good copy on both your PC and your backup.
Lesson learned?

Kees

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imported photos not showing only grey boxes Help
Sep 8, 2011 12:05AM PDT

Yes definately lesson learned... thank you for your help

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Answer
Are You Sure You're Looking In The Right Location?
Sep 8, 2011 1:59AM PDT

No guarantees here but because the thumbnails are actually showing a picture, it's entirely possible the picture itself was placed in a different location from the thumbnail.. Instead of looking for the picture using Picasa or Paint, try using Windows Explorer to find the actual picture file.. Such files usually reside in My Documents-My Pictures, in a folder dated for the time when you imported the photos.. Still, you may have to hunt a little.

If you can't find the photos there, try doing a search on the computer for all .jpg files, if that's what your camera saves the files as.. Click on Start-Search, then type "*.jpg" (without the quotes) in the search line should bring up all files with the .jpg file extension. It might allow you to find the actual picture files in their current location.

Hope this helps.

Grif

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imported photos not showing only grey boxes Help!
Sep 8, 2011 3:27AM PDT

Thank you for giving me more ideas to try, sadly though it didn't work, I appear to only have the thumbnails with 36KB. They were holiday photos abroad of about 100 only 3 appear normal of at least 4.70MB then after that they are all 36KB. Maybe the heat effected it !
many thanks for your idea though

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In that case, file recovery?
Sep 8, 2011 3:36AM PDT

Have you used this SD card since you deleted those images from it?

If not, (but even if you have it is worth a shot), you may want to try file recovery software, or 'undelete' software on the card. if that is your next chosen step then it is best not to use that card again until all avenues have been exhausted.

There will be no guarantees, but there seems to be plenty of options in a Google search for SD card file recovery.

Just a couple I see from the first listing page of my Google search;

http://www.cardrecovery.com/sd-recovery/

http://www.filerecoverytools.com/

But you may find more yourself.

See if any of those are free, or have a free trial, but as always, watch out for scam sites. My Firefox browser add-in "WOT" tells me those two sites I have listed seem safe.

Good luck.

Mark

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: imported photos not showing only grey boxes Help!
Sep 8, 2011 10:24PM PDT

Thank you for more ideas I tried Zero Assumption which just froze after a while not finding anything. I have now taken SD card to phtographic shop but don't hold out much hope sadly. I guess these cards go wrong sometimes!