Member Avatar for ggeoff

I have used Canon Zoombrowser to download photos from a compact flash card to my PC. However, the folder to which I thought I had moved the files does not contain those files and I cannot find where the files have been moved to.

A Search does not, of course find the files. Whilst the photos are still on the CF card I would like to know where the downloaded files have been moved to. Usually my photos are downloaded to My Pictures and then moved to, at present a folder named: 8 august within Pictures 2007. since I take a lot of photos I find that to store them by month is useful.

In this particular instance I had not highlighted the folder "8 August" but it was "greyed out". On intiating the Move option the folder disappeared from the My Pictures folder. and as mentioned above the folder has apparently disapeared into thin air! i created a folder called Test Move and repeated the Move option and the Search function could not find that file.

I regard this as a bug in Win XP (unless my sytem has been corrupted). The folder is moved and is not anywhere in the directory tree. I would have thought that if a destination folder is not specifically identified then surely the moved folder should be in the root directory of the drive, in this case Drive C or there should be an error message, eg. "Select a Destination Folder" and why is the apparent destination directory "greyed out". aurely it would be better if the desired destination folder were to be highlighted or not.

Does anyone know where these files or folders would have gone?

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Brief note tied to 's follow-up: the missing folder usually turns out to be on another drive with the same folder names — the Explorer "Move" tree can hide the root and make it easy to pick a folder on a different disk by mistake. The fix is simple once you know where to look; below are practical checks and prevention tips so others running XP don't get fooled.

First checks to locate photos quickly: search each attached drive rather than a single folder. From a command prompt run (replace drive letters as needed):

dir C:\*.jpg /s /b
dir D:\*.jpg /s /b
dir E:\*.jpg /s /b

Or use Explorer’s Search on "My Computer" and include external drives. If the Move completed and files are missing, check each drive’s Recycle Bin and the hidden per-drive Recycler folder (Windows XP uses a hidden "RECYCLER" at the root of each volume).

How Move behaves: moving inside one volume is a fast rename; moving to a different volume performs a copy then delete. If the delete happened, files might end up in a Recycle folder or be recoverable. If nothing is found, stop writing to the drives and consider recovery tools (PhotoRec, Recuva) or professional recovery.

Prevention tips: resize or expand the destination tree before clicking, confirm the full path/address bar, explicitly select the drive letter (or start at "My Computer"), or use Copy then verify before deleting. For camera imports, set Canon ZoomBrowser’s import folder so the software always writes to a known location. When checking hidden/system folders, be cautious and re-enable protection afterward.

Member Avatar for ggeoff

After trying everything I could think of, including checking from a command prompt -they weren't there! I found that I had moved the photo files to another drive, an external drive I use as backup and the directory structure is of course (almost) the same. The window cut off the upper portion of the directory tree so the root drive was hidden from view and the mistake was not detected!

This just underlines how easy it is to get bogged down in what is actually a simple mistake! please accept my apologies to anyone who has bent their minds on this one!

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