Find missing image on drive without knowing the name or extension
I have an image that I know somehow got renamed and does not have a normal image extension (i.e. it's definitely not .jpg .gif .png, etc) but rather some random non-image temp extension.
Is there a program or way for me to scan my drive to find all images based on the content-type of the files rather than the name or extension?
I'm thinking this has to be a deep-scan of sorts to really do this.
- Install IfranView (it's free).
- Click Options and then go into Properties/Settings
Tick the Other box, highlighted below:
Press Ctrl+F to bring up the search dialog box. Search within C:\Windows (or wherever else you think the image/photo was). You can tick the box to search subfolders. If you really have absolutely no idea where it is, you could theoretically search the entire C:\ drive, if you have a couple of hours to sift through the thumbnails for every single file on your computer.
- Click Start Search and let it produce a list of files
- Click the Show in Thumbnails button
- Simply scroll through the list and each subdirectory until you see the thumbnail of your image/photo. Easy peasy, if you have the time.
I guess my secret love for monorail cat is no longer a secret :(
If you're SURE you made it without an extension, there's not many files in the Windows directory that don't have extensions, so it should be easy to locate.
From a command prompt, run this:
dir c:\windows\*. /s /A-D /b > c:\files.txt
Then you'll have a list of every single file without an extension in a text file called files.txt in the root of your C:
You can probably ignore most of the really obvious directories.
Next time, how about a password protected .rar file? ;)
Linux systems have a 'file' tool that can tell you if a file is a jpg file by content, not by extension. Look into cygwin, maybe it has this tool too.