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Photos on your computer uploaded today. Where are my photos?! Recovering lost data

In the previous article, we talked to you about where files downloaded from the Internet are saved. And today we’ll talk about how to find files on a computer? Who among us has not found ourselves in such a situation? For example, you sat down at your computer or laptop one fine evening and noticed that Desktop is heavily cluttered with shortcuts, folders, text documents, video and audio files, so you decided to put things in order here. And that's right, it's yours Desktop in the end!

We started with program shortcuts, looked at which ones were unnecessary and deleted them along with the old programs. Various files located on desktop sorted it into folders, and then went on the Internet in search of some information, and after some time they naturally found this information in the form of certain files downloaded to your computer. Then all the files were again sorted into the necessary folders, and some were forgotten in desktop and went to bed with a clear conscience, the evening was not in vain.


Morning has come, you turned on the computer, and naturally you wanted to watch what you downloaded yesterday with sleepy and blurry eyes. While viewing, you noticed that a very important and necessary file for you is on desktop no, which you've been working on, for example, all week.


Perhaps you copied it to some folder when you were putting things in order or deleted it altogether. You open the trash, but the file you need is not there. We looked through the folders and couldn’t find it either. Cold shivers ran down my spine.


Wherever you looked for it, on the C:, D: drive, in the “Downloads” and “My Documents” folders, but you cannot find an important work file on your computer. Then the moment comes when you ask the eternal question: What should I do? How to find files on your computer?


First, you need to calm down and finding the necessary files on your computer is very simple. Most likely, your file has not gone anywhere and no hackers have stolen it from your computer (why do they need it 🙂). All you need to do is just use it correctly Searching for files on your computer.


First of all, open Cart and look carefully at its contents. If the required file is not there, then we continue searching in other places.


So how do you find files on your computer? Read the article further.

How to find files on your computer

With Windows XP/7?

The Windows operating system has a built-in and quite effective function for this. Located at: Start -> Search.


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You can also launch the file search window from any directory window, for example, My Computer, by clicking the button "Search":


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The following window will open:


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Here we can select the file type: text documents or multimedia files. When you click on the desired one, a window for selecting additional parameters will appear. For example, let’s choose to search for multimedia files (images, music, videos):


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Check the box next to the required type and click the button "Find". Let's take video for example. All video files on your computer will be found. It’s very convenient when you finally decide to put things in order on your hard drive and want to place all the movies, clips, etc. in one place so as not to waste time constantly searching for them.


Or when you definitely remember that you have this file somewhere, but where can you find it?! This is where this function will help you. You can also search for all video files on your computer by opening additional search options in the line “ Part of the name or the entire file name":


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Here you can write the types of video files separated by commas in this form: *.avi, *.mp4, *.3gp, *.flv, *.swf, *.mpeg, *.mov. These are the most common video file extensions. All files with this extension will be found. But in this case, you may miss some files by not specifying the appropriate extension.


In addition, you can specify additional parameters, such as the file size, the date the file was last modified, whether or not to search in hidden/system folders and files, and the search path. You can search throughout the entire computer or by selecting a drive or directory.


You can also search by text in a file. For example, you need to find all Word documents containing the word “abstract”. To do this, select the item "Files and folders":



and in the additional fields we write:


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  • In field No. 1, indicate the file extension - *.doc;

  • In field No. 2 we write the word/phrase that you want to find;

  • In field No. 3 search location.

And press "Find". This way, all documents in Microsoft Word format with the text “abstract” will be found, if of course there are any.


Now let's figure out how to find files on a Windows 8/10 computer.


How to find files on your computer

With Windows 8/10?

How to find files on your computer by name?


If you remember the file name, you can simply enter it in the field "Search" window "This computer" and press the button "Enter". The entire hard disk space will be searched for the file and the file will most likely be found.


If your file consists of several words, but you only remember one word, enter that word in the field Search, your missing file will probably still be found.


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How to find files on a computer by extension?


Finding a missing file can look a little tricky if you don't remember the file name. But then you probably know its working extension.


What is this extension?


File extensions are invented by programmers to identify the type of files. That is, each file belongs to a specific program, and thanks to the file extension, Windows understands which program can work with this file.


The extension is always separated from the file name by a dot, for example, take the file VirtualDub.zip as you can see the file name VirtualDub, and its extension .zip indicates that this is an archive file and archiver programs can work with it WinRAR, Hamster Free ZIP Archiver or 7-Zip.


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In other words, if you have lost a text file that you printed in the program Microsoft Office Word, this means the extension of your missing file .docx. If you have lost a photograph or picture, then the extension will probably be .jpg. If the movie is missing, there may well be an extension .avi, flv,mp4 or mkv.


What to do if you don't remember the extension of a missing file?


Surely you have other similar files on your computer, you just need to look at the extension of these files. By default, file extensions are hidden in Windows 7 and Windows 8, so you won't see them. To see file extensions go to the window "This computer" and choose "View" -> "Options"-> ->


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-> on the tab "View" uncheck the box "Hide extensions for registered file types", press the buttons "Apply" And "OK".


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Please note that many files on your computer now have extensions added after the file name. If you recognize the extension of your missing file (for example.zip), then enter it in the field "Search" and press "Enter". As you can see, our VirtualDub.zip file has been found.


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For example, we lost a movie with the extension .avi. The search results will contain all the movies on your hard drive; all you have to do is view the list and select the lost video file.


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How to find files on your computer by size?


Many experienced users may notice that there are many extensions for video files, so how can you find the file you need?


In this case, you can try to find the file by its size. For example, enter the following simple command in Search: System.Size:>1000MB. It means that you need to search for all files on your computer larger than 1GB.


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The search returned several video files, among which there was a file with no extension at all, but the name was exactly the same as that of the missing film. By giving it the extension .avi, I solved the problem.


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How to find a hidden file on your computer?


Sometimes, as a result of a system failure or virus activity, the operating system may assign the attribute "Hidden". If the item is not checked in the system settings, then you will not see these files and will not find them even through "Search", although nothing will happen to them at this time.


In order for hidden files to be visible in the operating system, go to the window "This computer" and choose "View" -> "Options" -> "Change folder and search options" ->


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-> on the tab "View", then mark the item "Show hidden files and folders", press the buttons "Apply" And "OK".


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It is quite possible that your missing file will appear on desktop. Or you can find it through the search function by name or extension. You already know how to do this.


How to find files on your computer by content?


If you have lost a text file typed in any word processing program (Microsoft Office Word, OpenOffice or Notepad), then you can find it by its content. To do this, you must remember at least part of its content.


For example, I have a file on my computer with the following content "How to find a file on your computer" . Enter this text in the field Search and press the button "Enter", then immediately a file containing this text is found.


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How to find files on your computer using Total Commander?


This cool file manager will be able to find a missing file on your computer using several signs at once: by name, extension, by contained text .

Good day.

I think that those users who have a lot of photographs, pictures, wallpapers have more than once encountered the fact that dozens of identical files are stored on the disk (and there are also hundreds of similar ones...). And they can take up a lot of space!

If you search for similar pictures on your own and delete them, you won’t have enough time and effort (especially if the collection is impressive). For this reason, I decided to test one utility on my small collection of wallpapers (about 80 GB, about 62,000 pictures and photos) and show the results (I think many users would be interested in this). So…

Search for similar images in a folder

Note! This procedure is somewhat different from searching for identical files (duplicates). The program will take significantly more time to scan each image and compare it with others to find similar files. But I want to start this article with this method. Below in the article I will look at searching for complete copies of pictures ( it does it much faster).

In Fig. 1 shows the experimental folder. The most ordinary one, on the most ordinary hard drive, hundreds of pictures were downloaded and uploaded into it, both their own and from other sites. Naturally, over time, this folder grew greatly and it was necessary to “thin out”...

Image Comparer(scan utility)

Official site: http://www.imagecomparer.com/rus/

A small utility for searching similar images on your computer. Helps save a lot of time for those users who work with pictures (photographers, designers, wallpaper collectors, etc.). Supports Russian language, works in all popular Windows OS: 7, 8, 10 (32/64 bits). The program is paid, but there is a whole month for testing to make sure of its abilities :).

After launching the utility, a comparison wizard will open in front of you, which will guide you step by step through all the settings that you need to set to start scanning your pictures.

2) On my computer, the pictures are saved in one folder on one disk (so there was no point in creating two galleries...) - so it’s a logical choice “ Within one group of images (galleries)"(I think for many users things are about the same, so you can immediately stop your choice at the first point, see Fig. 3).

Rice. 3. Select a gallery.

3) In this step, you simply need to specify the folder (folders) with your pictures that you will scan and search for similar pictures among them.

4) In this step, you need to specify how the search will be performed: similar images or only exact copies. I recommend choosing the first option, so you will have more copies of pictures that you probably don’t need...

5) The last step is to specify the folder where the search and analysis results will be saved. For example, I chose the desktop (see Fig. 6)…

Rice. 6. Selecting a place to save the results.

6) Next, the process of adding images to the gallery and analyzing them begins. The process takes a long time (depending on the number of your pictures in the folder). For example, in my case it took a little over an hour...

7) Actually, after scanning, you will see a window (as in Fig. 8), which will show pictures with exact duplicates and pictures very similar to each other (for example, the same photo with different resolutions or saved in different formats, Fig. 7).

Rice. 8. Results...

Pros of using the utility:

  1. Freeing up space on your hard drive (and sometimes significantly. For example, I deleted about 5-6 GB of extra photos!);
  2. An easy wizard that will walk you through all the settings step by step (this is a big plus);
  3. The program does not load the processor and disk, and therefore, when scanning, you can simply minimize it and go about your business.

Minuses:

  1. Relatively long time for scanning and creating a gallery;
  2. Similar pictures are not always similar (that is, the algorithm sometimes makes mistakes, and with a degree of comparison of 90%, for example, it often produces slightly similar pictures. In fact, manual “moderation” is indispensable).

Search for identical pictures on disk (search for complete duplicates)

This option for cleaning up the disk is faster, but it is quite “rough”: deleting in this way will only result in exact duplicates of pictures, but if they are of different resolutions, the file size or format is slightly different, then this method is unlikely to help. In general, for regular, quick “weeding” of the disk, this method is better, and after it, logically, you can look for similar pictures, as described above.

Glary Utilities

A small number of users sometimes need to look at all the available photos on their computer. This may be required in different cases. There may be many folders on the computer and it is difficult to find one of the photos without knowing its name. Another case is that you need to sort by deleting small-sized images.

To solve this issue, I will use the Windows 7 operating system as an example. First you need to log into your computer:

There will be local disks in front of you, there may be one or several of them. These are the sections of your . One hard drive can have multiple partitions, depending on the configuration by the user who installed the operating system.


I don’t know if you guessed it or not, but we will view all the photos on the computer using the Windows search built into the system. You can start the search right here, but I recommend selecting the desired section. How do you know which one is right?

If you need to find a photo in folders on, then immediately select this item in the upper left and proceed to the next item. If you plan to find a photo on drive D, then you need to first go to it and then start the search procedure, thereby skipping the search on other drives, which will save a lot of time.

Having gone to the right place to search, let it be drive D, click in the special search field at the top right and enter the extension or part of the name. If you know that you need to find a photo that has the letters IMG in the title, then you can enter them. Or you can enter the extension “jpg”, so you can see all the photos that have that extension. Cameras and mobile phones take photos in this resolution. Other pictures on the computer may be in other formats: bmp. png, gif or jpeg.


As you can see, the search process for files with the jpg extension is ongoing, 148 elements have been found and the process is not over yet. The more files on the disk, the longer the search process will take.


It’s quite a meditative and educational activity to look for who and how uses the result of your creativity and intellectual work. Sometimes this pleases, motivates and increases self-esteem, and sometimes it causes anger, because they drag everything that is bad and good, and when they try to point out that it is not good to do this, they say “but we found it in Yandex, so it’s general.” Well, okay, let's leave the showdown with copyright violators to the lawyers, our small business is to periodically look at how and what kind of life photographs live.
There are several methods that I use, they are slightly different and give different results, so they complement each other perfectly.

1. Google image search . It would seem that everyone knows about this, but no. Questions constantly arise about how this can be done.

Option 1.a- just upload a photo from your computer and the results will contain all the images that Google considers similar to yours. There are practically no mistakes, and sometimes there are even highly modified images that were made part of a collage or a background for something. Naturally, the quality of the search depends on the plot.




Option 1.b- use a browser plugin. I have this one - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/image-tools/
The point is that after installing the plugin, when you right-click on any image on the Internet, a menu appears that offers different search options. There is a Google search and a couple of other search engines. I tried to search with them all, TinEye gives more or less digestible results - they have their own database different from Google and sometimes they find something that Google did not find, but in general the database is much smaller and there are much fewer results.

In both the first and second cases, you will have to manually go through all your photos and look for the use of each of them separately. No automation, just routine.

The search result looks something like this

Well, then we go through the mass of found pages and look for some interesting or unusual use. Well, or we’re just glad that at least someone found our work useful and are trying to figure out if the photos were stolen or honestly bought through stock.

2. Also Google search, but different. In this way, honestly purchased photographs are searched, when using which they did not forget to indicate the author. This method gives much less results than the previous one, but you can find your photographs in some books or articles.
Everything here is trivial - you just need to enter your name or creative pseudonym in the Google search bar. But in order not to get bogged down in the jungle of results consisting of the pages of your own blog or portfolio, you need to do this wisely and exclude unnecessary things.
This is what my search bar looks like:
liseykina site: -livejournal.com -shutterstock.com -lori.ru -gettyimages.com -fotolia.com -depositphotos.com -liseykina.ru -liseykina.com

First comes the pseudonym under which I sell stock photos (you are very lucky if it is more or less rare and unique), then the keyword site followed by a list of sites that should be excluded from the search results with a “-” before the name of each. It's simple. As a result, we get a list of sites where your name appears and sometimes it appears in the caption to your photo

3. Specialized services. At the moment, I know only one thing - they did what I started doing about 5 years ago. But then things didn’t go further than a plugin for the browser, which could be fed a link to the portfolio, and it would search for pictures in the background and give a summary of usage. But my plugin died because I was too lazy and uninterested in modifying it following changes in browsers. But the same principle is used in the service Pixsy.com- you feed him a link to your account on photo sites, or upload an archive of photos, and in the background he looks for who is using your photos and how. In my portfolio from Flickr I found more than 10,000 uses of photographs, but it’s not very clear how to view and track all this.

For those who don’t have enough photo sites, there is the opportunity to feed a link to your site or upload photos in an archive

searching results

It’s quite convenient to filter them; for example, you can exclude individual photos from the search. Or websites. So, I almost immediately said that there is no need to look for matches on photo stocks, and there is no need to show me what was found on the pages of my blog and other friendly sites so as not to clutter the results.

The coolest feature is the ability to complain about misuse. In the event of a complaint, the Pixsy team will contact the site owner or whoever used your photo "without asking" and demand compensation from them. Naturally, they keep some percentage of what they receive for themselves, but the author still gets a pretty penny.
However, this does not work with all sites. They use some kind of algorithm to determine which site is commercial and which is not and allow you to demand compensation only from commercial sites. But this does not guarantee results. I sent several complaints to Russian and Ukrainian sites on which my photographs were definitely used without permission - with my copyright or those that were never sold anywhere, to which I received an answer that in these countries (Russia and Ukraine) the compensation program does not work .


But still the site is very cool and useful. I found a bunch of new things that I couldn’t find on Google with their help. The free version allows you to track up to 5,000 photos; if you have a larger portfolio, you will have to pay money.

And here mboyarskov a couple of years ago I described a couple more interesting search methods, including searching for your photos on Vkontakte -

Have you ever transferred photos to your computer and then forgotten where you saved them? I guess so. This happens to everyone. Here's an easy way to find all the photos on your Windows 10 computer.

Unfortunately, snapshots are stored in different places on your PC depending on where they were taken from. Windows saves photos in the Pictures folder by default. Some synchronization services take this into account and sync it with their cloud service. But some of them are stored in their own separate directories. If you transfer images from a camera or other device directly to your computer, those photos may also end up in different places depending on the transfer method. And if you download photos from the web, they will typically end up in whatever download folder your browser will use.

How to find all photos manually

If you have free time or you know exactly where something might be, then you can check the folders for photographs manually. The first two places you should look are your Downloads and Pictures folders, which you'll find under the Quick Access section in the pane to the left of the Explorer window.

Windows Search to find all photos

Windows Explorer has a function to quickly search for different types of documents. Most users don't know or never use it. But in vain, because the correct use of Windows search will help you find not only all the photos on your computer, but also other types of documents.

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the location you want to search. You can search either in a specific folder, the entire computer, or by selecting the “This PC” entry in the “Explorer” navigation bar.

Then click the search box in the top right corner of the window. This will display a hidden Search tab at the top. Click the Type button and then select Images from the drop-down menu.

Selecting search options inserts a statement into the search field. If you prefer, you can enter the operator yourself.

view:=image

As you can see, the results return all the images used by the system, the personal images contained in the folder and all its subfolders. The search includes images saved in JPG, PNG, GIF and BMP formats, which are the most common formats. If you have photos stored in a different format, such as RAW, you'll have to find them differently.

The search I ran on my computer found 729 images:

Once you have found the images you need, you can right-click on it and then select "File Location" to open the folder where the file is located.

Once you've found all the photos stored on your computer, you can move them to other folders - such as Pictures - or back them up to an external storage device, where they hopefully won't get lost again.