MISSING PICTURES IN MY PICTURES FOLDER!!

[GiGi]

Please help.  All of my pictures in my MY PICTURES folder are gone.  I downloaded recuva and nothing seems to have been deleted.  My only confusion is that my disk space has not changed at all.  I have many pictures on my PC and they do take up alot of space, so if they were deleted I assume that my disk space would have decreased.  What else can I do?  I've done system restores, I've searched for the folders containing the photos, I've searched for the file extensions, but nothing is coming up. 

[patio]

What happened prior to this ? ?

[GiGi]

Nothing out of the ordinary that I can remember.  No virus or malware issues....I went into the folder and all that appeared was a set of Sample Pictures that are standard pictures on my pc.