I am no nearer to understanding where the images came from, but I do have a suggestion which may explain their corrupted display.
I do regular back-ups of all my data onto both my internal slave drive and an external drive.
The first time I did this, I received a warning message pop-up to the effect ( I cannot recall the exact wording) that there were "hidden files associated with these image files and that if I failed to copy these files along with the images then data would be lost".
So, in Windows Explorer, I went tools>folder options>view and checked the box "show hidden files and folders"........and there was revealed in each folder a little file named "thumbs data file"
With that unhidden, I could copy my data across without problem and they now all display correctly on both my K drive and my external drive.
Perhaps you need to do the same when recovering deleted images....meaning unhide that "thumbs data file" so that it can be detected along with the image data ?
As you have already recovered the image files and changed their location, it may be too late to recover the "thumbs data file" which may be by now disassociated from the relevant images, but it may be a useful exercise to re-delete the images, show the hidden files and then try to recover them again. A very long shot.......it probably won't work now, but as you don't want the images you have nothing to lose.
