All of "My Pictures" are 'hidden' by Adobe

Win XP Home SP3 - the owner of this PC has over 2500 pictures stored in 'My Pictures' and various subfolders. Adobe Photoshop Starter Edition was installed which "hijcaked" every single picture and made them invisble to everything except for Photoshop Starter Edition (PSE). If you use Windows Explorer to browse to 'My Pictures', all the subfolders are there, but they are all empty, and the properties of each is shown as 0 bytes. I booted to a PECD and browsed to 'My Pictures', and sure enough, 7gb of pictures were there and totally visible, so I copied 'em all to an external drive. I rebooted to Windows and figured that PSE had hijacked the pictures, so why not uninstall PSE and it will 'release' the pics back to normal. Nope. I uninstalled PSE, restarted the PC, and 'My Pictures' and all its subfolders still show as empty. How can I resurrect these 2500+ pictures? I'm a bit hesitant to plug the external drive into the PC with Windows running (instead of a PECD), 'cuz I don't want the pics on the external to go missing too.... should I copy the pics back to the PC but use a different folder? How can Adobe get away with what amounts to holding your pictures hostage, and not releasing them when uninstalled?
:banghead :mad :boxing :guns :crybaby

 

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Greetings, dlb...

Seems as if I had a similar problem a while back...I got around it by re-naming the file extensions to some off-the-wall thing, such as ".txt", uninstalled the offending program (in this case, it was an old, buggy version of CorelDraw), then changing back to ".jpg" (or whatever) when they were visible again...

Don't know if that will work in your case (I'm not familiar with PECD), but it certainly helped me...

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A PECD is a bootable Windows-like CD based on Barts PE CD builder (PE = Preinstallation Environment). A well-known PECD is the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows (aka UBCD4Win). You boot to it, and it loads to an evironment that looks and functions just like the Windows XP environment, but it runs exclusively from the CD and/or system RAM. This provides the user with unrestricted access to the hard drive(s). This is ideal for virus removal and for situations where a program is interfering with normal operations like in my scenario with the invisible pictures. The pics are only visible on the PC when I boot to a PECD, or when the external drive where I backed 'em up is plugged in to a normally functioning system. I'm still messing with it, and the pics are safe on the external HD, but I'd like to get this figured out for the future. Unfortunately, renaming the files from within Windows is impossible because they are invisible, and in PE, renaming over 2500 files would be a bit maddening.... thanks for the idea though! I may use a variation of it as a "test".

 

From a command line couldn't you CD into the folder and use "rename *.jpg *.tnt" to rename all the pictures at once?

 

I'm viewing the adobe forum and the photoshop starter edition sounds horrible.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/474689?tstart=0

 

What would happen if you simply tried opening any of these photos with your "Open With" command, and put in, say, Microsoft Office Picture Manager (a GREAT photo editing app, by the way) or any other photo app you choose. If this worked on this one pic, then you could click on the link that directs ALL similar files to be opened with that program.

 

Problem solved: after uninstalling PSE, and after backing up the pics to an external drive from a PECD, I simply deleted the folders that originally contained the hidden pictures, then created new folders with slightly different names and copied the pictures back from the external HD. Worked like charm! :-D