Can I recover these photos!? Help!

Question

As described here: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5949036#5949036 I lost a bunch of photos in iPHOTO. But here's the update. I'm wondering if there's hope for me to recover these photos.
Based on what I read on the forum, I figured out that I had to reconstruct my iPHOTO library. Before I did this, I made a back up of the iPHOTO library file and saved it under a different name. Okay, I tried a couple of ways to reconstruct the library file, but nothing worked. I was resigned to the fact that I lost the images.
Well, last night, out of curiosity, I looked through the event just to see how many photos were gone. My camera numbers file consecutively, so this was an easy task. I'm at work, so I don't have the exact numbers, but out of about 300 photos in the event, about 35 or so were lost. Now here's the interesting thing, just out of further curiosity, I put a few file names into finder to see if it could find the pics (e.g., img_3333). Well it found the files in the iphoto library file that I backed up. The only thing is that it's not in the "original" or "modified" folder. I believe it's in a folder called "data". (I can be more specific when I get back to my Mac.) From the size of the file it's absolutely clear that it's only the thumbnail, though. (I shoot with a 10MP camera, so the files are quite large.) They're also found in a file with a .xml extension.
Anyway, now that i see the thumbnails there are definitely some that I want to recover if possible (One is a f18 blowing by me at very close range and only 10 or 15 feet off the runway!) Is there any hope to recover these from the back up file?
any help would be appreciated! Mahalos

Answer 1

Sorry for the lack of details, but I guess there's nothing really to tell. Everything was fine, the pictures were there, no problems. I loaded them up around Oct 14th, so about a month and a half ago. I showed them to a bunch of people already because I was showing off my new 24" iMAC. I looked at them plenty myself and my screen saver even points to that event.
Anyway, my father-in-law returns from being overseas for the past several months, so I was showing him pics from when he was gone (plus again I'm showin' off my new mac!). As I'm double-clicking images, instead of the image blowing up to full screen I get these huge exclamation points or blank screen. As I'm showing him pics, I notice this is happening for a lot of the images I'm trying to show him.
From my vast experience with XP, I figure something is corrupt. At this point, I hit the forums and try to reconstruct the library.
Here's the weird thing from today. i used time-machine to go back to my events and I do see some of the images that are missing. (some of them have blank frames with exclamation points in them) When I try to restore the image, it looks like everything is fine, but then I get an error message indicating that the file is missing. so I don't know what's going on. I know the pics were there on the date indicated on Time Machine, so I'm not sure why they're not there?