Lost original photo - how to export referenced photo as-is

Do you own a licence for PowerPhotos? PowerPhotos can handle items with incomplete originals.In the settings you can specify, how you want to handle items, where the originals are missing, when you import from another library. It will use code from the old iPhoto Library Manager when importing iPhoto Libraries.

If you do not want to invest into a different app, you could try to extract all files in an image format from the library package. But it will be a lot of work to reconstruct the library from the recovered items.

• Select the iPhoto library in the Finder and ctrl-click it.
• Use the command "Show Package Contents"
• In the Finder window that opens, open the folder "originals" and enter the key combination ⌘F to search for image files. For the search set the "kind" to image" and the the scope to "resources". My screenshot is showing the inside of a Photos Library package. I don't have an old iPhoto Library on this Mac, sorry. An iPhot Library will be different, but search through the largest subfolders in the Package,

Copy the found image files to a new folder on the Desktop.

Try the same search for other large folders in the library package.

Then import the recovered items to Photos.

You’ll have to recover from your backups. Only thumbnails reside in photos.

Afraid not.