Recover photos from organiser thumbnails

[Génépi]

Hello

i accidentally deleted some photo files (JPEG) in Windows 7 when transferring them to an ext. hard drive. There are no copies to be found In my computer hard  drive or backups. The thumbnails are still visible in the PSE 8 Organiser but are no longer, and cannot be connected, to the original files.

Please can anyone tell me if there any way I can copy these thumbnails so that at  least I still have a record of these photos? Many thanks.

[Greg_S. · Accepted solution]

Have you looked in the Recycle Bin?  Otherwise, all I can suggest is to use a file recovery utility. Ashampoo Undeleter is a cheap one that I have used in the past.

[Génépi]

Hi

many thanks for your suggestion which I will look into. I did try a couple of free recovery programmes with no luck on my HD and ext. HD. 

The  files were in fact  on an external HD before I accidentally deleted them so wouldn’t have gone into the recycle bin on my laptop which I empty  regularly after checking the contents.

[MichelBParis]

Unfortunately, you can't recover a better quality than the thumbnails, and I don't know any way to do that in batch.

The only way would be to display each thumbnail in the organizer and to take a screenshot.

Why?

Because thumbnails are not stored in any image format. They are stored as binary fields for images in 320 x 240 pixels size in the thumb.5.cache file in your catalog folder. That cache file is a sqlite database like the main catalog.psexxdb file. I don't know any utility to extract those binary fields and to convert them to photo format like jpeg.

[Génépi]

Many thanks. Screen shots would be a good option and as you indicate  possibly the only one. I will try that as I agree, whilst not being an expert  but following logic, there can no longer be any data attached to the thumbnails as they are no longer attached to any files.

[nevinf72588075]

One can also try another third party Photo recovery software, Kernel Photo recovery. It is a well tested and secure software developed by Kernel Data recovery.