Recently I was doing work for a customer and came across something I haven’t seen before in all my years doing repair work. If you used Windows Explorer and went to Libraries and then Pictures, you could see everything there just fine. But, open up Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo or any other webmail, and then try to attach that picture to the email using the Internet Explorer “browse” or “open” dialogue box and the pictures were nowhere to be found. Some of them showed up, but not all of them.
Furthermore, the problem was not limited to Internet Explorer. We were able to duplicate the issue in Chrome and Firefox. What could possibly be causing this?
It turns out to have been a file permission issue. For some reason these files, although visible, were marked as hidden. No, “show hidden items” wasn’t checked, and they weren’t shown as being ‘ghosted’ as shown hidden items can be.
The solution was easy though, it was to run BleepingComputer.com’s Unhide. Even though there were no indications of a virus, or even that there had been a file hiding virus in the past, this was the solution. It worked great! The customer was happy, I was relieved that it was fixed without something more drastic having to be done, and birds were chirping and singing. Okay maybe not that last bit.