PSE 4. Deleted all my pictures!

[Lucho1970]

So I took my external hard drive where I just finished moving all my photos. I have a backup, but it is about a week old and we just came back from a hockey tournament.
I decided that I was going to create a new catalog and store it on the same external drive where the pictures are stored so that I can just open that catalog if I was using a different computer.
On the root of my drive I have a folder nammed Photos
I created a new catalog and named it photos.psa and stored it in the root of the drive.
PSE seemed to lock up for a while then it finally came back with an empty catalog. I went to drag the Photos folder onto PSE to add all the pictures and I got a message that there were no supported files!
So I opened the folder in explorer and all that was in it was a file named "tn.5.cache". That's it! the folder was empty, all my photos were gone! Where did they go??? Is there any way to get these files back?

[GaryK]

Lucho

Welcome to the forums.

So sorry about what has happened.

If you are sure they are not there then don't mess with the drive. There are some around who have had some success with some file recovery programs. A lot of the success stems from not writing to the messed up drive until the files have been recovered.

I can't recall the names of the programs that have been used or who used them but hopefully they will be along in the morning.:)

[Juergen D]

I went to drag the Photos folder onto PSE to add all the pictures...
That action should not delete the content of the folder. Can you explain how exactly you were dragging? From where to where, was the Organizer open at the time? Are you sure the photos were in the folder before any dragging?

Juergen