OS X :: Won't Work With Back Up / Snow Leopard Deleted All Photos

Backed up my macbook air using time machine to my time capsule. Then went into iphoto and backed up pictures just to make sure. (They are all the pictures of my 6 and 2 year old since birth, very important to me). Opened time machine to make sure that my pictures had backed up, they were there and I figure everything is good.

I install Snow Leopard and after rebooting all pictures are gone. My iphoto library is gone. I went from 49.68 gig of used storage space on my hard drive pre-Snow Leopard to 17.92 gig of used storage space on my hard drive after installing Snow Leopard. I get kind of hacked off but figure there is no big deal since I know that my photos are in my Time Capsule. I go into time machine and there are 0 jpegs, 0 iphoto libraries and no pictures of any kind other than icons.

I freak the heck out and just plain don't understand. I call Apple 2 hours on the phone yesterday and 2.5 hours on the phone today and I am told that it is a problem being passed onto the engineering department and that they will get back to me but most likely the photos are gone and they are sorry. 3500 photos of my children's lives eaten by the dang Snow Leopard.

This is unacceptable, I did everything right in this instance, backing up my things, even spent the extra money to buy the time capsule, from apple, to make sure my backups went flawlessly. Got an appointment with the Genius Bar at the local retail store for Sunday but I was told today that they will more than likely not be able to help and will just add to the notes on my "Case" with apple.