the photoshop album program may be showing you cached thumbnail images - they are just small thumbnail images it saved when it last actually saw the file, but when you click on them to open and see the image, it says cant find the file.
if the files are truely still on your computer you should be able to find them just using the search file function under windows xp just ignoring the photoshop album app.
once you find the files, you can just drag and drop them onto your usb drive, or select and copy, then go to the usb drive and paste them into a new empty folder on there.
finding missing files that are just lost on standard disks is not usually a tricky problem for most people so please ask someone you know for help before paying any tech companies to 'recover' them for you.
If they have been deleted, they may still be accessible using data recovery programs or services, that are able to look at and find files that are marked as 'deleted'.
If you are unsure how deleted files could still be there yet you can't see them, think of the disk on your computer like a real world library.
your photos are like the books on the shelves, and the index that the librarian keeps is like the list of all the books in the library.
if a book is 'deleted' (like your photos may have been). it is not like actually removing the book from the library, it is just being marked as removed in the index, so the librarian tells you they cannont be found.
So like with the files that your computer shows you. If a file is deleted it may only have been removed from the index.
in this case sometimes the files can be recovered by the index being effectivly restored to allow those files to be shown again.
if too much new data has been written since they were deleted though, then they may be actually gone and not recoverable. this would be as if the library had continued to fill their shleves with new books, so they really did have to delete the old ones to make room, not just remove them from the index.
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