When I used time machine to recover lost photos, iPhoto lost my recent photos.

Yesterday, I noticed that iPhoto was missing all the photos from one event that was actually a number of events that I had merged together fairly recently. I used time machine from an external drive to recover them, but when I restored the photo library from time machine, instead of having that photo library in addition to the one I had before, the archived version replaced the current photos, so that any photos more recent than the event I was trying to recover have gone missing. I tried to use time machine again to recover the photos that I lost while recovering other photos, but now it seems that all of the photo libraries that would be recent enough to have the photos I'm looking for now match the version of the photo library with the most recent events deleted. When I tried to bring the more recent photos back using time machine, I opened the photo library and iPhoto said it detected inconsistensies in my libraries and that it would merge and correct them, but after it did so, the library was still missing my most recent photos. Is there any way to recover these photos? I uploaded them before I connected to the backup drive, but I think they should be stored in the time machine backups that are directly on my computer, I just can't figure out how to get to them.