Mising Photos

[woody nh]

My wife has a Note 10.1 (2014) WIFI 32G that also had a 16G SD chip.

Yesterday all photos but one camera photo had been deleted from the SD chip and all photos downloaded from Gmail had been deleted from the internal memory “download” folder. All of the missing photos had been there two days prior, she had been showing friends horse photos. She had taken no recent action to delete any of the photos.

The missing photos did not show on QuickPic nor the gallery nor the files app. Connection to the PC via USB showed the mounted SD chip with only one photo in the camera roll and the download folder in the internal memory with other downloads but no photos. I powered down the tablet, removed the SD chip and used an adaptor for direct connection to the PC. Still only one photo.

I then gave PhotoRec data recovery app a try:
6 data recovery tools for SD cards, USB drives and more | Computerworld
It took about 30 min to scan the 16G SD card and it recovered 261 photos and one video, most of the missing photos.

I would have suspected the SanDisk Ultra SD chip except that some photos were also missing from internal memory. Malware? All apps are from Google Play. I did install and run CM Security antivirus today and it fixed a “Broad Anywhere” vulnerability, no idea if that was the issue.
Any thoughts as to what happened?

 

[sko580]

Not sure if you took photos using burst mode. If so, I believe those photos are stored on the phone itself, even if you have an SD card.

 

[woody nh]

No, standard photos. Anyway QuickPic scans all memory for photos and then when connected to the PC we searched both the internal memory and the SD card. As I noted,most of the missing photos were recovered from the SD card using PhotoRec.

 

[Moshe Barash]

Try 360 security it is the top rated for malware protection so maybe it could do a better job. Also did you connect your Google account because photos always backup to the Google cloud if you configured it in "settings"

 

[woody nh]

Try 360 security it is the top rated for malware protection so maybe it could do a better job. Also did you connect your Google account because photos always backup to the Google cloud if you configured it in "settings"

Yes I will take a look at 360, thanks. Given the sudden lost of content on both the SD card and internal memory, malware is a possibility.

A few months ago I set my wife up with Google Drive to store photos and reviewed how to use it. Now after the loss it is likely that she will use it.