MSN messenger photos (1 Viewer)

[freddienonose]

I have a puzzle for you tech heads. I actually got myself half way through a computers degree a few years back before dropping out but I've fogotten everything. Sort of like Irish.

Where are the photos that you can see when you try to change your display picture in MSN stored? If you browse for a photo from your harddrive, select it and use it even once, it's in there for ever more, ready to be easily selected for use again.

Thing is, I deleted a whole folder of photos from my PC by mistake but the photos are still available for selection in MSN. So where are they stored? I've looked everywhere, ran all kinds of searches, but no joy.

What's the story with that?

 

[Rogue]

Have you actually tried selected them as display pics? they may just be cached as part of 'change display pic' dialogue in which case when you try to select them you should get an error of some sort...

 

[Rogue]

http://johnbokma.com/messenger/make-display-pictures/comments.html

scroll down a bit

 

[freddienonose]

I have, yeah. I can select and use all of them as the display picture no problem despite them seeming to be nowhere on my computer.

 

[Rogue]

That page has the answers but by the looks of it i was right the first time.

Download and run the irfanviewer from http://www.irfanview.com/.

"%appdata%\Microsoft\MSN Messenger" gets you to the right folder, then go through the numbered folders in there and open the 'usertile' folder, drop any of the TFR* files into the irfanviewer, say no when it asks to change filename and there ya go.

Seems to be only cached thumbnails though, the test pic i sent through was full screen but the TFR* was messenger sized.

Well impressed with that irfanviewer though, photoshop couldn't do that!

 

[freddienonose]

Thanks a lot, Igor. It was a pain in the arse to lose some old photos like that.

You don't know what format would be the best to save them in if I want to enlarge them a little? They're only 8.86kb.

 

[pete]

if you deleted the folder (relatively) recently try this http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html