Photos Disappeared from Hard Drive

Nothing is scarier than finding your precious photos missing from the hard drive where you had saved them securely.

What could be the reason for the disappeared photos? If you have not deleted them, what causes the image files to disappear? And is there any way to get missing pictures back?

No worries. This post will answer all these queries and know how to recover lost photos from the hard drive.

Possible causes of photos disappeared from hard drive

Deletion is not the only cause of missing photos. Storage drives, including hard drives, can get corrupt/ failed, infected by virus/ malware, formatted, or face other technical anomalies that can result in loss of photos.

Maybe your image files are inadvertently hidden or a recent Windows upgrade lead to photos disappearance. Windows OS crashes can also lead to the loss of existing files.

How to recover disappeared photos from a hard drive

Regardless of the cause of photos lost from the hard drive, as you realize the files are missing from the hard drive try the given methods here to restore them.

1. Recover photos from backup

A secure backup plan is always a good remedy to recover photos or other files that are lost or deleted permanently from computers and other storage drives. Check your backup drives for the disappeared or missing image files.

2. Unhide image files and folders

Photos in the hard drive won’t be visible when their ‘View’ is hidden. Simply unhide the files and folders to recover disappeared photos.

Here’s how you can unhide files and folders:

• Open File Explorer from Windows 10 taskbar.
• In the top bar select the View tab and click on Options.
• Select Change folder and search options.

In the Folder Options window, click on the View tab

Check-in Show hidden files, folders, and drives and OK.

In Windows 11 the steps may vary as below:

• Open File Explorer.
• Click on the View tab.
• Select Show and click on Hidden items to unhide the files.

Now check in the drive or folder whether the disappeared photos are restored.

• 1. Recover deleted photos from Previous Version on Windows hard drive

The previous version in Windows is backup copies of files that Windows stores as a restore point. You can restore files to the previous version and even recover deleted pictures by using its feature

Just follow the given steps to restore photos from Previous Versions:

• Right-click on the drive/ folder and select Show more options.
• Click Restore previous versions.
• Select the required previous versions of drive/folder.
• Click Restore. The image files get stored on your PC.

3. Sign in using the correct user account

Often Windows upgrade develops new user account. You get automatically logged in with a new or different account that obviously won’t contain your photos or other files.

You can check this by going to Settings > Accounts > Sync your Settings on PC. The following message would be visible — ‘You are logged on with a temporary profile. Roaming options are currently unavailable’

So if the photos disappeared after upgrading to Windows 11, log out and sign in again using the correct user profile.

4. Change Indexing Options in Windows

Indexing catalogs the file information like metadata or name etc. It helps in quick file search. However, if you find some image files are missing from the PC, it could be an indexing issue. You can try by troubleshooting index files and then recovering missing photos from the hard drive.

Get on to the below steps to troubleshoot the search index:

Go to Control Panel > Indexing Options.

Select the Advanced button to open the Advanced Options window.

Select the Index Setting tab and click on Rebuild.

Follow the prompts, and once done, restart your computer. You should now be able to recover the missing image files.

5. Use a photo recovery software

When none of the manual methods is fruitful, use photo recovery software to get back missing or disappeared photos from the hard drive.

Use proficient photo recovery software that can thoroughly scan the hard drive and retrieve image files. Professional tools can work on corrupt or formatted drives as well to recover deleted photos.

There are also free versions of professional photo recovery software that can retrieve deleted photos at no cost. For instance, Stellar Photo Recovery Free Edition can restore up to 10 photos from the hard drive.

The recovery process is straightforward and includes the below steps:

• Launch the software and select the drive. You can turn on Deep Scan.
• Click Scan.

Conclusion

Photo recovery software is a quick approach to recover disappeared pictures of any file format from the hard drive. However, you should once try the manual methods to restore lost photos. Who knows you may recover all the missing photos free without any tool.