I needed to temporarily move out some photos that were mixed in with an event I had and did so by dragging into a folder on my hard drive. Unfortunately, I did not discover until after I deleted those photos in Aperture that this process significantly reduced my file sizes. For example, some of these photos were from 2002 and only 1 mb or so in size and now are 100-200kb in my finder folder. I have searched everywhere and cannot find a explanation for this.
You need a little education on file management in Aperture.
I have a bunch of stuff here [http://photo.rwboyer.com]
A brief explanation of what happened is that when you drag photos out of Aperture what you are doing is just grabbing the generated previews NOT the original masters. Hence the "reduction" in file size. This actually makes sense once you have a handle on how Aperture does things.
All may not be lost. When you deleted the masters from Aperture they were place in the system trash. If by some chance you haven't emptied the system trash yet they will be there.
Thank you very much. This helps and I understand what I did wrong. Fortunately, I was able to recover the originals with a data recovery program I have. Live and learn.