iPhoto : how to recover imported photos that are now "*.ipmeta" files

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.

I understand my mistake was to import the photos in iPhoto without first moving them to My Pictures.

It wasn’t, unless you’re running a Referenced Library. Are you?

Then I deleted all photos from the camera

You can probably recover the photos from your camera card with an app like MediaRecover.

Today I open iPhoto and I don't find the photos any more : neither in iPhoto nor in My Pictures.

Are you sure you don’t have a damaged database file?

Option 1
Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the apple and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Rebuild iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup.

If that fails:

Option 2
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords, faces and places back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

photo.002723.ipmeta

These are database files of about 4kb each. They are not your photos and your pics cannot be recovered from them.

Regards

TD

This happened to me as well.

Yesterday I uploaded photos from a recent trip from my Canon T1i straight to iPhoto. Everything uploaded correctly at the time. At a later time, I went back into iPhoto and all those pictures were missing. As I looked more closely, I noticed that all of the photos that I had uploaded from a particular date (Aug. 22 album) to yesterday's photo-upload, were missing. Everything prior to that is still there.

I'd also like to note that I did save my iPhoto Library to my ex. hard drive RIGHT before I closed out iPhoto AFTER the latest upload - checked the ex. hard drive and photos from Aug. 22 to yesterday are also missing. I am a novice with MAC computers in general so I am not sure what I did "wrong".

The only up side to this is that I purchased MediaRecover and was able to recover MOST of the photos/videos from my SD card. Two of the videos cannot be opened by Quick Time or DiVX (or any other app/codec I have tried). Either it is not "understood" or "VLC does not support the audio or video codec undf". When I "GET INFO" on the file itself, there is a "size" or volume size it takes up on the disk.

I tried Rebuilding iPhoto and everything is the same.

Any help is appreciated on recovering the other photos and videos.

Thanks in advance.