Can't Open Pictures Folder!!!! Help!!!

Yesterday I was in my "pictures" folder organizing my photographs and i saw the little iPhoto symbol that said Library 6. I made the mistake of clicking on it, not I cant open the pictures folder, it tells me to choose an application to open the now "document" in. When I tried to use iPhoto it could not import because the photo's had been converted to metadata. Please help, as a photographer it is important that I have all my photo's, especially since my external is broken.

Not sure how to correct your current problem, but if you want to use iPhoto, you MUST stay out of the iphoto library in finder. Doing anything at all to your photos there will render iPhoto app unable to find them and will corrupt your database. You have already caused yourself problems for when you do get iPhoto to open. You will be met with a grey square with an exclamation point for each photo that you moved, renamed, rotated, etc. Users are not meant to go into that file.

You might try opening iPhoto with the option key held down and following the instructions to rebuild your library. Otherwise, we'll hope somebody else can chime in here and be more help.