[digiKam-users] 5.6.0 crash-pictures gone-drive space still allocated

[rutile]

I am travelling, and have a 'new' laptop with Digikam 5.6.0 on Ubuntu 17.10

Short Version:
After a Digikam glitch, Digikam has restarted as a new installation, and all
my pictures located in the /Pictures folder on the internal SSD card are
missing, but hard drive space is still allocated to them.


Long Version:
I have my images and Digikam database in /home/me/Pictures.
I copied the subfolders in my Pictures folders to an external hard drive
(~100 GB), using the file manager.  The external hard drive was a database
connection in Digikam as a removable hard drive, originally with a separate
set of images.

After a short trip, I restarted my computer, and my original file structure
was fine, and Digikam operated as usual.  I copied the contents of an SD
card to a new folder created in Digikam, and worked with the pictures after
copying.  I then copied the contents of a second SD card to a new folder on
the external hard drive using the file manager.  (the last two sentences are
correct to the best of my recollection), while Digikam was still open. 
While the files were copying to the external hard drive, I tried to use
Digikam to open an image in the Digikam database in a folder in /Pictures. 
Digikam gave an error "cannot open image".  I shut digikam, and reopened it,
and Digikam started from scratch with the option to set the database
locations.  

According to the fresh restart of Digikam, and the file manager, my
/home/me/Pictures folder is empty except for newly created Digikam database
files, and a 24.6 kb cache folder (plus empty Presets folder).  However, the
available hard drive space shows only 28GB available out of a 256 GB SSD
drive, reflecting the presence of the missing ~100 GB of pictures.  

A folder on the Desktop containing pictures that was also in the Digikam
database is apparently unaffected by this glitch.

1)  Is there anyway to recover the images from my laptop SSD drive?  Is
there drive space allocated to the new "digikam trash" somewhere that they
might be hiding?  I had not backed up the Digikam database.  The copies on
the external hard drive seem to be OK, but now I'm back to just one copy of
the these once in a lifetime images, and that is making me nervous- i'd like
to recover any images from the SSD card, and am trying to limit any writing
to the disk until I resolve this, meaning new images are being only copied
to the external hard drive.  

2) if the images are not recoverable, how do I free up the hard drive space
that is being allocated to them?

Thanks



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