Thousands of grey thumbnails with duplicate ._IMG* filenames?

Hi
I have iPhoto 9.5.1 for Mavericks and have 10's of thousands of grey thumbnails that I cannot view. When I check the info on these they all show with a ._ prefix. E.g. "._IMG_0041", when I search for IMG_0041 I can see the photo fine. I have gone through all the first aid options of rebuilding thumbnails to rebuilding database and still I can see these grey thumbnails.
My question is what are these and why am seeing them and can I safely delete these without causing other issues?
Thanks

Has it ever been on a FAT or NTFS drive or a NAS? It sounds very much like what happens when such a drive sees the resource fork of a file and doesn't know what to do with it. You get a dummy file with a leading .and the same fileame.

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