Hi - we have 'lost' photos in the iphoto library

Hi - we have 'lost' photos in the iphoto library & relevant albums & slideshows frm 2009-2012; they are shown as empty. Older photos (pre 2009) were backed up & are all there in the library, album and slideshows although jumbled up in the library - this totals 1239 items, when there should be 10,000. We don't really know when this occurred - although photos from August 2011 were put on the computer around Xmas time - since that period this has occurred.  Also when we try to open a 'empty' slideshow, the iphoto application often automatically closes.
OS is v10.4.11, iphoto v6.0.6.
Only 3.5GB of 149GB is free on HD.
Restarting didn't help.
We have a LaCie external HD which we were going to use to do a backup and to transfer the Iphoto library across to, to then delete older photos in the main Mac HD and free up space; this is when we noticed the lost photos. We have not plugged in the external HD at all yet.
Pls help. Thanks

Hi Barry
thanks for your response.
After digging around the pictures folder on the mac HD I found all the rolls located under pictures/iphotolibrary/originals - here it appears all recent photos are present in folders by year, and can be viewed in preview as jpegs.
Before trying a rebuild of the iphoto library - and viewing various related posts- I did a drag and drop of the entire pictures folder onto a external hard drive as a back up.
I have now tried to do a rebuild with the original mac HD iphoto folder but it is still the same - only early pre 2009 photos shown.
I have tried to create a new iphoto library using the external HD - When I try to create a new iphoto library from the external HD it only shows the same as the one currently on the mac HD however if go to next level down and I select the originals folder it appears that all 16000 photos are now being imported but none of the albums and slideshows are retained.
Any further thoughts on this?
Thanks

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