photos accidentally put in trash and emptied trash. help!

I am not as familiar with my mac as I would like to.
I was in the process of exporting my photos from iphoto by clicking on events and then clicking the export tab/drop down window... for some reason.. the exporting process stopped in the middle of doing it.. I cancelled ..now I can't find  half of the thumbnails of each folder/date where the photos are contained... I have about 423 events.. .. now I only have about 25 folders of that on the events tab of iphoto..although I can still see that the events still have 423 in the parenthesis..but the thumbnails do not show them..
where did those pics go? can I unhide them? did they get hidden somewhere?
they are not in the external hard drive where i was exporting them..

help! thanks to any ideas/solutions!

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