lost iphoto and images

Hi..

I recently transferred iphoto along with all the images in it, from my macbook, to a 1TB Seagate external hard drive as it contained 28000 images and my macbook was down to the last 14GB.

Everything was fine for about a month, I could plug in the external hard drive and access iphoto and see all the images fine, and I could plug in my camera and download the images direct to iphoto in the hard drive.

But a couple of weeks ago something happened, I don't know what, and now I can get into iphoto. I plug in the external hard drive, open up iphoto, it bounces in the dock for a bit and then stops and nothing appears. Then when I hold down the mouse key on iphoto, the iphoto window drops down from the corner, displaying all the correct information- the amount of images, etc, when I hover over it, a blue border appears, and when I go to click on any part of the iphoto display, the window just disappears again.

I am really worried about all my images, I have nearly 30000 images on this hard drive and I have no idea why I can't access them! I don't know if it's the hard drive or the computer which is the problem. If anyone has advice I would be very grateful.. thank you!

If you try launching iPhoto with the option key held down, what happens?

What should happen is you get a dialog box that asks if you want to open an alternate iPhoto library or create a new one. You would pick open an existing one and then manually direct it to where your regular iPhone library (on the external drive) is.

Does that fix the problem?