Recovering Photo Library package contents after accidental deletion on Mac

Good Afternoon all good people,

My name is Jeff and I live in Wisconsin originally from Madison. In 1985 I bought my first Mac and within a couple of years I was purchasing them for many companies and supporting them. I’ve been working on and supporting them almost everyday since then. Recently I made the worst move I have ever made on a Mac.

I’ve been using Photos since it was first released in 2002 and added a lot of photos along with designating everyone and entering Keywords along with Captions and more. Back in October 2024 I decided to scan my family’s 27 photo albums which dated back to 1905. I had setup a series of folders in My Albums that designated years and events and copied most of the text that were on or next to the photos. It was a very involved project but I won’t go into details. Recently I only had seven albums left to go….

All my photos were on an external drive which stated to have issues a year ago so I copied them to a new 14TB drive before I started this new project. I had a Time Machine backup of everything but I’ve had a lot of issues with it over the years. I decided to delete it and make a new one once I was finished with my latest project which of course was very stupid but things got worse. This has also never been backed up in iCloud. I have a lot of external hard drives and decided to clean them up. My Photos Library was in a folder named Backup and I tossed that into the trash and deleted it and I can’t begin to tell you how destroyed I am right now. 

I have tried countless methods of recovering it! There are many ways that appear will work but all it’s going to do is recover the actual photos and not the entire Photo and not the Package Contents. Of course this means I would have to start completely over going through everything which has taken me 100’s of hours. I’m sorry to have written this long story and believe me when I say I’m very unhappy right now. I’m wondering if there is a way for me or some outside professional to recover the actual Package Contents so I don’t have to completely redo everything? Thanks so much for any assistance at this point!

[Edited by Moderator]