840 photos imported onto new hard drive have no originals

I've been anxious to get my fresh start with iPhoto 6 on a new hard drive. I'm determined to have better photo organization from the start. I've been using this method (which I learned here on the discussion boards) on my laptop recently and it's worked flawlessly. This is how I imported them:
I had my preferences set to let me use Image Capture upon connection to my computer, then I sent all the photos to a folder on my desktop. From that folder I opened all the photos in Preview. There I went through each photo and deleted the bad ones from the folder before importing to iPhoto. I also sorted them into sub folders and gave them names I wanted to appear on their roll titles. At that point I drug each folder over to the library in the left hand column of iPhoto and let them import. After they imported, I hit delete on the folders on my desktop with the belief that they now resided in iPhoto.
I tried dragging a couple of photo onto my desktop so that I could resize them and post them on a forum and it said I couldn't access them because the original was in the trash. I looked at the information panel in iPhoto and it listed all the data, including file size. Here's where I made my terrible mistake. I thought that the computer did not like there being two copies of the originals, one being in the trash, so inspite of the "This action cannot be reversed" warning, I deleted the trash.
Now it appears all I have in my library is the alias of each photo. It will allow me to enlarge the photo momentarily before it tells me there is no original and goes to the dreaded gray blank with the dashed line.. WHY? I imported it. I don't understand.
Am I simply out of luck with this one? Is my only option to size the images of my lost photos to the largest I can before they turn to ghostly blanks and use grab to salvage the small image that's left? Oh how tedious, but I need some of those images! I know the pixels will be gone and the size is less than I want but some I could still use on the forum I want to post them on. I am so disheartened about this.
What's even more aggravating is that this is an empty hard drive and I could have easily drug them out of the trash and put them all in a folder with no strain on my memory. I'm just so used to being up against the wall with no memory left that I hit delete. I'm kicking myself pretty hard right now!

MacLoyal:
Did you have iPhoto's Advanced preferences set to NOT copy the files into the library when importing? It sounds like it, particularly the Originals folder contains nothing but alias files. If that's the case then you were required to keep those files you so carefully organized in folders. Those are the source files. If you haven't used your Mac a lot you may be able to recover most of them with SubrosaSoft FileSalvage. You can download and run it in demo mode to see who many of the image files it can see and recover before committing to purchase.
Also if you haven't reused the memory cards MediaRECOVER can recover them. It too has a demo mode to see what it can recover.
Bottomline: using the alias mode you must retain those files you imported into iPhoto and should have them in their permanent location before importing.
Do you Twango?

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