Recovered Permanently Deleted Files from Cache but Files not Full Size

Hi, @Jillian24090138pxwg.

First off, my sympathies for inadvertently deleting some of your files. If it makes you feel any better, I do not know if ANY photographer has not done that at least once. 

To recover the content from the cache is pretty clever, but as you see, the cache's content is to help an application display the photograph, not be the photograph. Outside of using some software such as Topaz's Gigapixel to increase the size (their Photo AI can also do this and a lot more, I do recommend it), there's not much more you can do with these images.

Have you investigated file recovery software. They are not very expensive, but they can involve a lot of time. 

One other area that it doesn't sound like you were using: backup drives. While most people think of backup drives being used to recover from a hard drive failure, it's also things like this that can make them essential. Here's what I do:

—I have a 4 TB drive that holds all of my images and many documents. I have a 2nd 4TB drive that I use to back up my first drive. I manually do this at least once a week or more often if I've done a lot of work. I have a 3rd 4TB drive I use for Apple's Time Machine. I also use a cloud service in case the house burns down. Am I paranoid? No, just a realist. In a worst-case scenario, I would not lose much, at worse, a bit of time. Since 1987, I've had three HD's crash. I only lost data on the first one.

You do not state if you are on a PC or a Mac. If you're on a Mac, I do recommend that you use Time Machine — it works. I am not aware of any comparable software on the PC.