how to deal with recovered photos from external hard drive crash

Hi,


I had 2- 4 tb drives (one the backup of the other) become unmountable within minutes of each other (right after Disk Utility's First Aid said it couldn't fix them. What a coincidence... Apple's Genius said coincidences happen...) I was able to recover 3.1 tb of data (when it only held 2.7) from one and the other one is being recovered. I used Disk Drill to recover the one so far.


I now have 610 gb of picture files (arranged by format) in the Reconstructed folder and 477 gb in my user Pictures folder. As far as I can tell having only looked at a few pics and Photos libraries, the pics and Apple Photos libraries in the Pictures folder are good. Yay. (I don't recall how big that folder was before they drives became unusable. Also, I think it was a formatting problem not a hardware one and I may use the old drives as backups to filed away once I get my new backup back.)


The question I have is, how can I deal with the pics in the Reconstructed folder? There are 1685 jpg folders with 1000 pics in each one. They ALL have lost their file names and ALL have creation dates of the day it got recovered (3/26/25) so without looking at each one, I have NO IDEA what each one is.


There are too many to put into a/several Apple Photos library/s for whatever good that would do.


Any ideas on how I can check them against the files that are in the Pictures folder (and all of those are in their correct folders with correct names, file names, creation dates, etc.)


Or do I just keep them and somehow enjoy them by randomly looking at some here and there?


All ideas welcome (including on how to deal with the other types of files (docs, audio, video). I may be ok with the video files, thanks to Usher being the database I use for them.)


Thanks.

MacBook Air

Posted on Mar 28, 2025 12:48 PM

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how to deal with recovered photos from external hard drive crash

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