Missing photos replaced with ipmeta files

This happened a while ago now, so I can't remember the ins and outs. My Macbook decided to have a hissy fit and crashed, after leaving it for a good hour it was still stuck, so I had to hold down the power button to restart. However, when it restarted, a good portion of my photos were missing, when I tried searching for them in finder using when I last accessed them, I found all that were there were .ipmeta data files. Is there any way whatsoever to recover these photos or convert them back? A lot of them were old family photos from cameras etc we no longer have, and at that point in time I didn't have timemachine set up (stupid I know!) Thanks.