How do I transfer all my iPhoto contents from my external hard drive back to my MacBookPro iPhoto?

Question

My MacBook Pro recently had to have it's software cleared completely by a genius at the apple store. I purchased an external hard drive to save all of my documents and photos safely on so I would not lose them. I now am having difficulty reloading all of my iPhoto contents back onto my laptop from my external hard drive. Has anyone else experienced this? Will my iPhoto library go back to it's original appearance with all of the special albums I had made and the way in which I organized my photos and videos? How do I find what folders my photos were saved on my external hard drive to drag back onto my laptops iPhoto library?

Answer 1

iPhoto stores it's pictures in the Pictures/iPhoto Library, so if you have this backed up on a external drive, then it's a simple matter of replacing the new iPhoto Library (free of anything) with the copy of the older one on the external drive and running iPhoto.
If you have some items in the new iPhoto Library you can export them to the Desktop until the old one is replaced and then reimport them. Also another mehtod is to right click on the iPhoto Library and "Show Package Contents" inside is a folder called "Originals" which contain your files.
If you replaced the files and iPhoto doesn't open up, then reset it.
iPhoto rebuild database:   https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2638
You might want to consider not having your movies in iPhoto, it's not designed to handle too much, in fact 10,000 pictures of mine seem to overload it.
You can keep seperate iPhoto Libraries, use the option key held at launching of iPhoto to select another iPhoto Library.