Is it possible to rescue photos in iPhoto when the remote storage device is no longer available?

I have about 1500 photos in my iPhoto '09 v8.1.2 (424) library.  I had "Copy items to iPhoto library" unticked, as the photos were all stored on a Western Digital "MyBook" network drive.  However, the drive exploded in a way that gave me no chance of data recovery.
Now, every time I open iPhoto, I am shown thumbnails of all the photos & I can explore the events: -
I can even enlarge them, but when I do, iPhoto tells me they are unavailable: -
Is there a way I can use the iPhoto library data to restore the photos?  I'm not looking for originals or original quality or size, but I do want iPhoto to stop moaning and to be able to know that my library is intact and contains real items, rather than ghosts of the originals.
BTW, I now have a http://bit.ly/qnap_ts-439-pro-ii running RAID 6, so future data is better protected against drive failure.
Cheers,
ChrisP

Chris
The best you can do is recover the thumbnails from this library, create a new one and start over.
To recover the thumbnails: 
Go to your Pictures Folder and find the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.
Look there for a Folder called Data. The Thumbs are inside. Drag it to the desktop. You can now dump that library, it's useless.
Hold down the option (or alt) key key and launch iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Create Library' and import those thumbs.
As a note: Running iPhoto as a Referenced Library is not recommended, especially with the files on one volume and the Library on another. For more on the pitfalls of that
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3062728?tstart=0
Regards
TD

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