Recovering the photos and music from an old slideshow project

Whether an old project can give your pictures back depends on which program made it. Photo Story 3 copied every photo into its .wp3 file, so the photos are inside even if the originals are long gone. Movie Maker never did: a .wlmp or .mswmm only remembers where each file was, so the project tells you what to look for and where it used to be, but the files themselves have to be found.

From a Photo Story 3 project (.wp3)

A .wp3 is a Microsoft Cabinet archive with another extension. In the projects I have opened, the pictures inside were the full-size originals, the narration was one WAV file per slide, and any music you added was stored as its own MP3, WMA or WAV.

On Windows there are three ways in, none of which needs extra software except the last:

• Copy the file, rename the copy from .wp3 to .cab and double-click it. File Explorer opens it like a folder; select everything and drag it out.
• Or use the expand command that comes with Windows, which does not care about the extension. Make the folder first, because it will not create it: mkdir C:\story then expand -F:* "Summer 1973.wp3" C:\story. I ran that on a sample project and it wrote the five photos, project.xml and the music.
• Or open it with 7-Zip, which reads it without renaming.

On a Mac, The Unarchiver opens it. On Linux, cabextract does.

What you get is Photo Story's own naming: 0.jpg, 1.jpg and so on, narration0.wav, SoundTrack0.mp3. Which photo belongs to which slide, and the words of each caption, are in project.xml. If you would rather have them sorted, drop the .wp3 on the converter and choose Download the zip: it puts the photos in slide order under their original names where the project recorded them, with a slides.txt listing each caption, and it is free. Getting the photos out of Photo Story has more on what that zip contains.

Two things do not come back. Edits made inside Photo Story (crops, rotations, black and white, text on a slide) were saved as instructions, so the photos come out as they were before. And music made with Photo Story's "Create music" button was never stored as a sound file, only as settings.

From a Movie Maker project (.wlmp)

Open a copy of the .wlmp in Notepad. Every filePath="..." is one photo, clip or song, with the full path it had, such as C:\Users\Ana\Pictures\Lake\IMG_0412.JPG. The path itself is a clue: the user name says whose account it was, and the folder names often say which camera import or which trip.

Search for the file names, not the folders. Camera names like IMG_0412.JPG or DSC01234.JPG are unusual enough that a hit is usually the right file. In File Explorer, type the name into the search box on This PC; or use the PowerShell snippet on the WLMP to MP4 guide, which checks every name in the project at once. Places worth searching besides the obvious Pictures, Videos and Music folders:

• OneDrive, Google Photos or iCloud, if the phone or camera synced there, including the recycle bin on the web.
• External drives, USB sticks and memory cards that still have an old import on them.
• The old computer's drive, if it still exists. Even a dead laptop's drive can be read in a USB enclosure.
• Previous Versions (right-click the folder, Properties, Previous Versions), if File History or restore points were on.
• Old emails and chat apps, for photos someone sent you.

Gather what you find into one folder. The free check reads the .wlmp in the browser and matches each file by name against that folder, so you can see what is still missing without opening the project in anything.

From an XP or Vista Movie Maker project (.mswmm)

The same rule applies: the file lists paths, not media. It is a binary file rather than text, so Notepad shows the paths with gaps between the letters. The .mswmm page has a PowerShell line that reads them out, and the free check on the Movie Maker page lists them and looks for them in a folder, the same as for a .wlmp. One extra: an .mswmm keeps a small thumbnail of every clip, but in the projects I opened they were 153 by 115 pixels, so they show what a missing photo was rather than replacing it.

When the files are gone for good

Look for the finished movie. If anyone saved it as a video, there is a .wmv or .mp4 somewhere, often with the project's name, and you can take stills from it in any video player. They will be the size of the video, not of the original photos, but a 720p frame is still a decent print at small sizes. For a drive that was formatted recently and not used much since, a free recovery tool such as PhotoRec can sometimes pull photos back off it; stop writing to that drive until you have tried.

Updated 25 October 2026.