What also puzzles me is that when we uploaded a picture its name had to be unique within the site and we got an error message if it was not. It seems that the system now knows the images by totally different names, but has all trace of our original names been discarded?
"Original names" were just character strings stored in the database. Pictures were given an ID followed by a random character string - so at the end there were two columns for picture names: "original name" and stored name. Unfortunately the connections between a certain message (or topic) and the picture names were lost. Therefore the attribute "original name" also disappeared.
What we did earlier today is really simple. We took the creation time of a message made a tolerance of 35 seconds and looked for images made at the same time. It is a bit crude, but worked - in 46,500 cases
Next up, when my bro will have time again, we'll do something with duplicities and we also need to do an internal adjustment so we can start adding pictures and puzzles again without causing any more confusion