iPhoto 5.0 How-To: Recover iPhoto 4.x's "Recovered Photos"

iPhoto 4.x did this weird thing where some photos, with no apparent pattern, were placed a "Recovered Photos" album. However, they were not recovered at all and were actually corrupted. In my Recovered Photos album, there were 77 photos and only 3 of them would display anything, and those I couldn't do any more but see the thumbs.

I tried the rebuilding the library fix, but it didn't work so I developed the following workaround. However, this requires a pre-corruption back-up, which limits it's utility to those of us who are lucky enough to have one of those.

1. Open ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml in a text editor.
2. Find "Recovered Photos" in AlbumData.xml.
3. Copy and paste to another text document the list of numbers below between the <array> and </array> tags. Each of these will have it's own <string> and </string> tags surrounding it.
4. Find "<key>" + one of the numbers between the <string> and </string> tags. This will display the actual data of the photo represented by that number.
5. Within the photo data, you'll see a location that looks something like /Users/vincentpace/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2004/10/03/myphoto.jpg. Copy and paste this somewhere. This is how you'll be able to find the photo in the back-up. Be careful not to use the other locations, such as the location of the thumb or the original if it was edited. I simply copied everything that was between the <dict> and </dict> tags.
6. Using that location which contains the name of the file (myphoto.jpg) and the date of the file (October 3, 2004), you should be able to find it in your back up, especially if the back up was just a back-up of your iPhoto folders.
7. Delete those damn Recovered Photos from iPhoto.

This workaround frankly sucks, but it at least gets the photos back for you.