I was using the file manager to copy multiple selected photos to a external drive when the OS gave me an error, with the skip or skip all option. I skipped one then it appeared again, so I skipped all.
Now I cannot see the photos but I just have some folders with funny characters as names and two large files of no type and also with funny names.

Anyone any ideas how I can recover the photos.

They were on a memory card from the camera, with others unselected. The unselected are fine.

Define "funny names" and "funny characters" or post the names.
Are you copying these to a partition on Ubuntu? Recover from where, the drive to which you copied them with the funny names or are they also gone from the memory card. Recovering photos should work with 'photorec' which is part of TestDisk which you can download and run from Ubuntu.

There is now 3 additional folders and 2 additional files in the folder that held the photos on an SD card. The folders are empty, but the names are using ascii characters like the box shape,maths pie symbol, etc. The files are large, one is over 4GB and the other is 212MB. The file names are USBCC, with the second c having a symbol hanging from it.
The second file is called VAE, with the AE the greek symbol.
The photos were on a SD card connected to the PC in a card reader via USB. Also connected was a hard drive i wanted to copy them to. The PC was just being used to transfer them.
There are other photos on the SD which are fine as they were not selected to be copied.

sounds like something went wrong alright.
if you are indeed affected by data loss, try not to use (write to) your computer's hard drive or the sd card.
boot from some live medium, and download photorec/testdisk.
with these command line tools you can recover the files to another device. it's tedious work.

I tried the tool and it recovered 1000's of jpg's but most are copies of each other which I don't understand really. But not the photos's I'm missing. Disappointed, but it seems like they are gone. Windows detecting errors on SD card, might let it try to fix it and see what happens as little choice left now.

I don't suppose you made note of or remember specifically what the error was? I think that would help some of the more expert Linux users point you in the right direction. A friend of mine had the same problems with a memory card from his phone and was able to recover the images with photorec so it is pretty good software and usually works.

Are these on the SD Card or in the folder to which you tried to copy them. Good luck with it.