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Strange folders appearing on my desktop

Avatar Mark Ford
One folder is called recup_dir.1 and is 3.47 GB on disc.
The other - recup_dir.2. and is 1.57 GB on disc.
They contain photographs that I have taken during June & July this year
The first folder has 995 pictures in it and second 442.
The numbers of the photos are the same as the camera puts on them except the initial P has been replaced with an f.
There are 15 Document files with the numbers as above but ending .Apple which won't open.
There are 3 down among the .jpgs ending _pid_0.m2ts with a sort of Road cone icon.
There are two ending .gz with a zip type icon.

There is a .xml Text Wrangler report of 169KB full of code - it seems to be code for the pictures and at the beginning
it includes,in black, the words Carve Report and PhotoRec

The same pictures appear in this strange folders and in Photos where the number is different but the date, the time, the size and the dimensions are the same.

I haven't done an exhaustive test but the strange folders seem to contain both the pictures I kept in Photos and those I discarded.

Thank you for reading this far but what ever is that all about them?

Re: Strange folders appearing on my desktop

Avatar Mick Burrell
You won't be surprised to hear I haven't had exactly the same happen here! But some suggestions to get you started:

I wonder if recup_dir is an attempt at recovered directory.

Try changing the .Apple suffix to .txt and see if text Edit can open them.

Is the road cone icon orange and white? If so, that's from VLC which is a video player. This would link with the m2ts suffix which is normally associated with Blue Ray DVDs. However, if you've made a typo and the suffix is actually mt2s (transpose the t and the 2) then that's associated with AVCHD video.

Re: Strange folders appearing on my desktop

Avatar Mark Ford
Thanks for reading to the end and responding Mick!

I changed the .apple suffix as you suggested and Text Edit opened it and showed a document full of a string of type employing a range of unfamiliar symbols - here are the first few lines which contain the only language I recognise:

Mac OS X  2∞‚ATTR;ö…ˇ‚òòcom.apple.quarantine0002;55896c46;Preview;This resource fork intentionally left blank ˇˇ˚Áö«∏HéÁRY…$Ú{íØı≠ŒTóµáöˇ2á>òŒ9ˇ?çZyÂó V?(‡/@G©ıÔÕyy¢Nî[ûˆ\⁄ƒEwB=©Údv¬æ

The road cone is orange .m2ds and it is a video opened in VCL as you suggested.

Because I want to see & use the metadata I download my photos to folders on the desktop and do my first round of discards there - so it might be that these strange folders contain photos & vids that were on my desktop and not in the Photos application.

Some of the .jpgs are very small files - thumbnails - under 10KB. The vast majority are the size my camera produces - around 7MB.

Re: Strange folders appearing on my desktop

Avatar Tony Still
Mark,

As a wild guess, might you have had a crash of the Photos app? The contents you describe could be a recovered data set (that was perhaps intended to end up in the Trash). The XML file and photo files fit that theory (the Text Wrangler mention is probably a red herring, it's probably the default app for XML on your machine). The .apple file looks like a binary file so not human-readable: could be anything, including garbage!

If Photos, or wherever you keep your photos, is working OK (and, specifically, the pictures you see in the odd folders are working OK within it), I would be inclined just to put the data somewhere safe. If everything is still working after a few weeks, consign it to the Trash.

Re: Strange folders appearing on my desktop

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Whilst I don't think that Photos has ever crashed on me, there's no doubt that it is quite a troubled app behind the scenes, but tries to bluff it out so as not to worry the poor user. My latest example was importing a number of photos sent to me as attachments to an e-mail. I used the pop up menu in mail (paper clip symbol that appears when you hover over the divide between message header and body - yet another example of hiding away useful functions). Nothing appeared to happen. However when I launched Photos manually, the photos were there - or at least four of the twelve were.

I repeated the process with Photos already running. Again only four of the twelve photos were imported, and I'm not sure it was even the same four. So I saved the attachments to a folder on the desktop and dragged them into Photos from there. In all this, Photos never gave any hint of distress. If it had imported say 28 out of 30 photos, the odds are I would never have noticed the omissions.

Everyone makes mistakes, but we do tend to trust the people who admit to them more than the cover-up merchants. Apple developers, please take note!!

Re: Strange folders appearing on my desktop

Avatar Mark Ford
Very many thanks for your thoughts & comments - as Tony suggested I put the data away - things have gone well in the last month. You are right Trevor, life moves so quickly and important things get forgotten and overlooked - like thanking you both!
 
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