@RoosterMaind Hi. Hmm unfortunately if you opened the project as a zip file and the images aren’t there, there is little we can do to recover the work. In these cases we always suggest prevention methods like having multiple backup copies.
If by any chance your Pencil2D crashed there might still be hope though, please try to take a look at this guide Pencil2D Project File Corruption Prevention / Partial Recovery Guide and if you’re using Windows go to the temporary files folder / Pencil2D / and look for the folder that has a name similar to your saved file, inside you should be able to find most images that were dumped the last time it was opened. There are ways of getting the same result on MAC on Linux but you need to be more savvy with those OS.
If you say you lost the images without a crash that is unfortunately non-recoverable. You could try the last step on the guide which is a suggestion on using a recovery software to try to get the temp files back.
You can also try to share the corrupted file so we can take a look, but if the corruption happened due to an interruption in the saving procedure then the problem is that the first frames would have been lost since Pencil2D saves from the last frame towards the first, so if there’s a problem the first ones are usually always lost in the process.
Since you mentioned that the XML was intact then it’s even more weird because 100% of the time file corruption happens the xml is lost… Tell me, are you using the latest version of Pencil2D 0.6.4? if you’re not, that is itself a problem because older versions are more prone to corrupting files, and we had a painstakingly difficult process to try to weed out as many errors as we could, it’s still not perfect but it’s much more stable, so please try to use the latest version when possible.