Deleting photos-big fat oops and now what?

Question

I deleted some photos from another application (adobe bridge) and now, when I am in iphoto and I double click on the thumbnail all I get is a grey window with a big exclamation point in the center. So, although I can see the photo in thumbnails I cannot do anything with it like dragging and dropping or copy and paste or right click/'open with.' Is there any way to retrieve these photos?

Answer 1

iPhoto keeps up to 3 versions of each photo: the tiny thumbnail, the full-sized original, and a modified version if you edit. We know you didn't delete the thumbnails, but they are really only suited for onscreen viewing and not useful for much else. Whether or not you can salvage some of your photos depends on what you deleted and if another large version exists.
Did you delete the files from the Originals folder in your iPhoto Library folder? If so, and the photos had been edited (including portrait-oriented photos rotated by a camera's auto rotate function), perhaps you can locate the edited versions inside the Modified folder. Conversely, if you deleted the files directly from the Modified folder, you could try to locate the Originals. In that case, you could also try right-clicking the thumbnails and doing a "Revert to Original".
If you find the files, drag them out of the iPhoto Library folder to your Desktop. Then use iPhoto to place the thumbnails in the iPhoto trash and empty. Once deleted from your library, you can import the files in again.
There is no way to turn those tiny thumbnails into useful files, so if you don't have a file in Originals or Modified then those photos are gone. In that case, drag the thumbnails to the iPhoto trash and empty it. With any luck, your database will survive the damage you caused by dealing with the files directly inside the iPhoto Library folder. Without that luck, you may have to rebuild your entire library from scratch.
As you have seen, Bridge and iPhoto are incompatible. For the future, you can set Photoshop (Elements) as your external editor in iPhoto's Preferences. Instead of using Bridge to browse inside your iPhoto Library folder, you use iPhoto itself. (Which is way, way more powerful than Bridge.) Select the photos using iPhoto, open them for editing in Photoshop, and when you Save (not Save As) the edited version will be automatically saved into your iPhoto Library. It's a workflow that took me awhile to get used to, but now seems natural. I still have a set of images that I don't want in iPhoto, and I use Bridge to browse those folders.
Regards.