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I can't see all the photos on an old 256 NB Sandisk flash drive when I connect it to finder on my MBP.
I can see many more of them when I mount the CF drive on an old NuVue photo frame. Any ideas?
Regards, Patrick
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.6
Hey there Patrick,
While we're unsure of the format(both of the flash drive and the photos), specifications/compatibility of the photo frame, those are all only guesses as to why you see more photos vs. when viewing the same contents of the memory card in question. That being said, we'd like to rule out some possible causes:
Cheers!
Once you have the files in an ordinary folder, you should be able to import them all in one go in photos just using the file>import menu entry.
Background to .trashes
In mac world, . in front of a folder name is a hidden folder.
I suspect .trashes is part of the recycle bin. If so, then the files in there have been previously deleted but are still in the recycle bin. A normal search of the drive won't find them, since they are supposed to be deleted and you don't have read access to the folder.
However, I suspect that if you'd opened the recycle bin while the card was mounted in finder, you'd have found the files there.
Is it possible the frame is scanning all folders on the card, and in finder, you are not looking in all possible folders.|
Is it possible there are images on the card in an old format no longer compatible with MacOS.
I'd suggest finding a photo which is visible on the frame and finding out more about it - eg filename - then doing a spotlight search of the card on your mac to see if a search can find that file.
Thanks for your reply, Tony.
My son Martin has a Windows laptop and he found that he could see all of the photos on his machine when he loaded up the flashcard in Windows Explorer. Many of them were in a folder with a title ".trashes". (The first digit in the title was indeed a dot!).There was another folder structure inside the "dot" folder. The subfolders within had titles of the form attributed by the software of the old canon camera I'd used back in 2002 and later. The filenames were of the form: "IMG_1462.JPG".
My son copy/pasted some of those photos from the .trashes folder into a new folder on the flash drive titled "Test1".
He gave me back the flash drive and I then found I could see the files on my MacBook pro in "preview" but still not in "Photos".
I then double clicked one of the "invisible" image files and it opened in preview. I clicked on "share" and I was able to transfer it into "Photos".
The basic picture information had carried over into Photos including the date and time.
Success at last! I shall now have to recover them with my son's help and shift them in the same way.
Tony, I assume you are right. The pics are probably in an old version of JPG which my Apple MBP can't read. It worries me that this king of thing might well render files unreadable in the future. Perhaps I'd better start printing everything!
My thanks and best regards, Patrick
Hello Tony,
Your solution is spot on. I have found the phantom photos by remounting the flash drive on my MBP and opened the bin folder.
I have moved one or two of those old jpg files from there into a trial new folder. Sure enough, I was able to verify that it was indeed one of the many previously "invisible" photos. This is a much simpler solution than my clumsy workaround above.
My thanks to you.
Inaccessible photos on a CF drive
