Lost almost all my original photos in iPhoto. Have rebuilt the library to no avail.
I tried to share my events and photos from iPhoto in Flickr by copying the events and then clicking share button in iPhoto and choosing Flickr. After some events appeared in Flickr in new albums, I realized I had lost some of the events and photos in iPhoto. If I open iPhoto I see my events some with cover photos and some just a black box with original title but empty. When I click the ones with cover photo, many have only a few photos (originally they had many more) and worse when I click the thumbnails a black box appears with a gray triangle and an exclamation mark in the middle. I have followed the rebuilding option from iPhoto First Aid but got no where. The library shows that I have the original number of photos I had (over 38,000) and also the same number of events and album titles BUT the original photos are mostly missing, only a few thousand are showing in the original size! Most of thumbnails seem to be there though many are also missing. I just cannot locate the originals. In the Masters file in iPhoto Library I don't see many original photos either. It just seems all my photos are deleted! The subfolders in Masters are 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 (I suppose for the 4 years I have used this Mac). The sub-subfolders under each year are named with numbers, like under 2011 there is only one called 11, under 2012 there is 05 and 07 sub-sub folders, under 2013, 04 and 08, and there are more under 2014 from 02 to 08. When I click any of these sub-sub folders I get additional folders with numbers but no order. If I click these folders I get a long number folder which is generally empty except for some where I can see original photos. I even tried to see if I could find a backup of iPhoto Library through Time Machine (I use CCC to backup my Mac) but the Library files I found were all from the time AFTER I had tried to share my photos in Flickr. So I did not find additional originals. It seems Flickr has just literally deleted most of my originals by taking them away from my hard disk!! Unfortunately they don't show up in Flickr either!
What has happened to my original photos? Are they lost or deleted for ever? I tried to use recovery software to see on my hard disk whether there were any of my original photos but didn't see them. Can someone help/advise what to do? I use an I Mac with OSX 10.9.4?and iPhoto 9.5.1. Thank you.
iMac