I have an extremly delicate problem. The photographer that recently took my wedding photos uses a Mac. I gave him an external HDD which he then formatted to FAT32 before copying over all the photos he took at our wedding. Got the HDD home (I use Ubuntu 14.04), and alle the photos were readable from the external HDD. No problem I thought.

I then copied all the photos to a NAS I have at home. Again, all the photos were readable in Ubuntu when reading them from the NAS. I then reformatted the external HDD to NTFS (my wife uses a Windows pc) and copied all the photos to the external HDD. When mounting the external HDD on my wifes Windows pc we noticed somehting strange I have never seen before. Nearly half, but not all of the pictures filename(these are ordinary jpg files) started with a .(dot) at first, and the filesize was just 4kb per file. The files were also shaded in color, indicating that they somehow were hidden. Any idea why this is, and is there anyway to fix this?

sounds like you just copied the thumbnails or the apple meta data of the image of the images and not the full size images

what apple folder s did you grab them from ?
one of them would be just a link to the real image

If half of them are the 'dot files', and half of them seem perfectly fine jpg images you had expected, perhaps you actually have all the images just as you should.. and also the thumbnails (which probably are of no use). If possible, you could check the number of properly working files, and confirm (possibly with the photographer) if you have the correct number of them. Maybe also compare the number of larger files to the 4k files and see if they match.

I wish it was so. 1100 of the jpg are .(dot) files, 1600 of them ar actual files, and the grand total is 2700. The thing is when I got the disk from the photographer the total was 2700 working jpgs(and there were no duplicates), so 1100 of them have now gone bust and become .(dot) files. To make things even stranger, they (all of the 2700) was fully working and readable from my NAS up until today (when I opened them with my Ubuntu PC), but after my wifes Windows PC connected to the fileshare to view them from the same NAS 1100 of them went bust. To be more specific, once she opened the filshare every single one of the 2700 were .(dot) files, but after marking them all, right clicking and deselcting hidden(because the were all hidden files when she viewed them), 1600 showed up like you would expect like normal jpgs, but 1100 became hidden .(dot) files, not only for here, but for me as well when I try to view them from my Ubuntu PC. This is the strangest problem I have ever come across. I am guessing it has to do something with UNIX and super user permissions, because the files originally came from a MAC, and I am guessing that the MACuser copied the file to my external HDD with SUDO privileges and therefore they become hidden from a Windows user, whereas I could view them totally fine up until today. Strange....

Have to admit that goes beyond my understanding, so at this point all I can do anymore is observations and guesses. Hopefully someone with more experience on the area can give something more specific.

The 4k file size sounds like allocation unit of NTFS, so it sounds like they're 'minimum' size files. Way too small for good quality JPG, so anything that's 4k size isn't going to become back. If you can somehow, anyhow, open them, then they sound like thumbnails. If you can't and they appear corrupt, in particular if the actual filesize of each of them (not just the allocated size) then the more likely case would seem to be that something went bad somewhere when copying files. Something like, a file being copied on top of itself (I once wiped whole subtree with careless root access 'cp' command that accidentally copied everything across softlink back to original subtree. Every file wrote on top of itself, and after first block the rest silently vanished, because source was no longer available).

Since the number of files matches still (1600 + 1100) It seems that 1100 of the original pictures would indeed have been destroyed. If all of them have been handled exactly the same, at each step, then it sounds like the results would be random. Obviously file systems and file operations generally shouldn't act randomly.

If you view the files on Ubuntu, then I assume under normal circumstances any file with leading dot would not show up at all. So presumably you could have both 2700 'regular' files and 2700 'dot files' and only see the regular ones. For windows, I'm not entirely sure how it would handle the situation (Normally I would test it from my server, but ever since my raid array went bust, I'm not in position where I could do that just now).

So my best guess would be that something went wrong when changing the file attributes. Assuming that both the 'dot files' and 'regular jpg' files coexisted at that point, perhaps the hidden attribute prevented the regular ones from showing up on windows, and perhaps the 'dot files' were the only ones that did show up. In a way you could say that leading dot is the unix/linux way of making the file hidden. This might be slightly far-fetched, but maybe removing the hidden attribute attempted to somehow 'merge' the files with leading dot, and (hidden) files with regular name, within the same directory. This could lead into some of them being overwritten.

Another possibility that comes to mind is based on what John VV said earlier:

I'm not familiar with apple myself, never used one, so I don't know the details of how it handles files. However from what I gather, it's possible that when viewing files across net, the client system would be blind to the fact that some of them are in fact links. There's then possibility that when copying the files over - or when changing attributes - a situation similar to what I described (copying across symbolic link) would result, and basically either some of the links would replace the real files, or some of the files would attempt to overwrite themselves through the link. In both cases the result could be random based on whether the original file first overwrote the link, or whether the link overwrote the real file.

Well I'm not saying 'give up hope', but if none of the systems can find (some of) the original jpg files, it's highly likely that they no longer exist.. and the 4k files won't become fullsized versions of themself. If the photographer happened to still have the originals on memory card or the like, that would offer the most reliable solution.

Not sure if this will help, but you could backup all the pictures somewhere else and carefully use testdisk on the external HDD to see if it's possible to restore it to its previous state... That or ask the photographer whether s/he still has the pictures.

Reported. Don't "jump" on someone else's question/thread just to post a random opinion you can create your own threads for that!

@sakoi, it's worth asking the photographer if they can re-give to you copies of the content which you paid for; there may be a fee, however you paid for them and therefore have a right to those image files. Sounds like something weird was done by one or more systems. If those 1100 files are still the same sized files, then rename them once again to proper names; make secondary backups of them and separately see about determining what's up with your wife's PC and how it interacts with files on the NAS. For instance, make a copy of files which it previously altered, enable as much debug as you can on the NAS and try to determine why this happens. I fear that next you may find that other files have problems. I mean, that's not an expected outcome. I think a first thing is the fact that the files are considered hidden or non-readable to her PC originally. It really should be that she can see the files on the NAS without needing to modify them.

I also find this question answer. thanks for asking..