How to find photos in iPhoto which may not be there - but appear.

Question

An acquaintance of mine has by accident deleted a bunch of photos from iPhoto, assuming he had already moved them into another folder. Somethings strange happened, as the still appear to accesible, but then again not really. I have promised to help him, and he explains his actions like the following:
1. I transferred my photos from a Fujifilm Finepix camera to a New Event (A) in iPhoto.
2. I then deleted the photos on the camera.
3. Then I made other new folders/events (B) with other names.
4. I moved the photos from folder A to these new folders B without any problems (I can still see these photos as small bitmaps, please see later)
5. Then I created another event, but by accident I gave it the same name as the folder A in which the photos originally were.
6. I then deleted this original folder A from which the photos had been removed, as I assumed it was empty.
7. Now - this process has caused that the photos have disappeared everywhere, and I cannot see the photos in folder B. However, empty frames of the photos appear there.
8. Also, when I press the Edit button at the bottom of iPhoto, all the photos appear at the top as small bitmaps, but they cannot be opened.
9. The photos cannot be seen in Finder, in Trash inside iPhoto or in the normal OS X Trash bin.
Now, the question is: are the photos to be found for recovery somewhere in iPhoto (or elsewhere) which we as amateurs do not know about - since they appear as thumbnails?
I hope somebody can help.
Thank you kindly.

Answer 1

first off we only have words to communicate with so it is important to use them correctly adn consistantly
You seem to be using folders and events interchangelably
In iPhoto folders are organizational elments that do not hold photos - they hold albums or other folders  --  are you talking about events in every case or are you talking about finder folders (which do hold files that may contain photos) accessed via the finder and events accessed via iPhoto?
Thumbnails are totalklyt seperate from the main photo - iPhoto always has either two or three versions of a photo used for different purposes - a thumbnail and the oriiginal plus possibly a preview of the photo - these are each in seperat files (and in seperate folders within the iPhoto database) and any of the three can be missing due to datgabase errors or user actions - without exact and accurate information we can only make guesses about yoru situation
How were the photos moved from event (I assume) A to B
How did you delete event A
What version of iPhoto and of the OS?
LN