Deleted "duplicate" files from All Images in Finder

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A friend of mine told me that I had a bunch of "duplicates" in the all images folder in Finder. I deleted every duplicate and then, stupidly emptied my trash!!! When I later opened iPhoto, I couldn't view most of my pictures. If I clicked on one of the blank photo spaces, I could see the thumbnail pics at the bottom of iPhoto. I could also see my pictures if I scrolled through iPhoto quickly.
I did buy a recovery program and recovered every photo that's ever been on my Mac (260,000+). Very frustrating to sift through these, which I haven't finished yet. If I import my pictures from the recovered folder back to iPhoto, they are saved as new photos.
I'm so lost. Is there any way to get my photos back to iPhoto the way they were before I deleted all these files from All Images?
I hope I'm explaining this well...screen shots attached. Any help would really be appreciated.

Screen shot 2012-12-18 at 9.00.26 PM.png

Screen shot 2012-12-18 at 9.02.54 PM.png
 

chscag

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Someone else can answer your basic question.... but some advice:

Start making backups. Time Machine or a cloning type program for backing up such as Carbon Copy Cloner will save you hours of searching, recovery, and unnecessary work. And it might be a good idea with that many photos to store them elsewhere instead of on your Mac's hard drive. Family photos are generally irreplaceable; things like baby pictures, weddings, and so forth are precious. Take good care of them. ;)
 
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Chscag is right, even if you just import a fourth of the photos it's a lot and the very least you should do is get an external drive and use Time Machine that came on your Mac to back up.
I don't know of any easy way to get things back like they were, but I noticed that you don't have any Albums or Smart Albums in the side bar under your Library. If you are just relying on your memory to remember what Event a photo is in it will be kind of hard a few years down the road and with hundreds of Events to scroll thru. Since you are going to re-import all your photos again it would be a good time to make it easier on yourself finding photos later. I would start by making a Smart Album called No Keywords with the rule "Keyword is None". To make a Smart Album look under iPhotos File menu. Now when you import a group of photos they will all be in that Smart Album. Next use (command k) to open the Keyword editor and start making a few Keyworks you will want to use to Search by, a lot are already there to start with. Maybe make a Smart Album "Holidays" and when you find a batch of holiday photos select them all and assign the Keyword Holiday to them. Do this for several types of Smart Albums with Keywords till you have all photos with at least one Keyword and and in at least one Smart Album. Later you can go back and break them down with more Keywords like Christmas, Birthdays, Weddings, etc into Smart Albums and then add a Folder for Holidays and drag the new holiday Smart Albums into it. Now you can find any photo or group of photos just by starting to type a keyword or several keywords in "Search" at the bottom left corner of iPhoto. Click on Photos under Library and you can search through all your photos or just select a Folder or Smart Album to search only in it. The more you use iPhoto the more ways you will find you can look up photos. Using "Sort Photos" under the View menu, Faces and Places also make it easy to sort and find photos. I hope this helps you get back to where you can find and organise all your photos.
 

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