Import photo's from camera has destroyed iPhoto library

Question

I upgraded to iPhoto '08 a couple of days ago, and everything worked fine. But, after importing a few photo's from a Nikon point and shoot just now, it appears that I've lost all the other photo's in the library. The photo's that I just imported are now the only ones in the library. Thousands of images have just vanished.
I've checked in the iPhoto Library package and it looks ilke the files are still on disk. I've also tried rebuilding the library and fixing permissions. No luck.
I don't have a recent backup of the iPhoto Library, and I'm not willing to lose several months worth of photo's to go back to an old backup. So what are my options?
I've copied the iPhoto Library to another location and I can create a new library and import everything from the old Originals folder, but what happens to all of the edits I made to these photo's. As far as I can tell they're stored in the Modified folder. Does this mean that I either have to import Orignials and lose the edits, or import the Modified folder and lose the ability to go back to the originals?
This really *****. You would think something as simple as this would have been caught in QA. How did this software ever get to market with a bug like this in it? I'll be able to get my photo's back, although not without a considerable amount of hassle, but what about the thousands of folks out there with their family albums in iPhoto who are about to lose everything as soon as they connect a camera to their Mac. I doubt they'll be thinkging very highly of Apple, that's for sure.

Answer 1

I just did a bit of investigating and things are getting very weird.
iPhoto '08 didn't crash when I did the import, howere I did notice something odd. I store my photographs on an external hard drive and alias to the iPhoto Library from the Pictures folder. After I imported the recent photo's I noticed that my external hard drive was mounted twice in the finder. I unmounted it thinking that it was just an anomoly.
The external drive is called Galaxy1TB. To check to see whether there were multiple libraries on my Mac I did a search in Spotlight for "iPhoto Library." Two showed up, the backup I just made and one located in /Volumes/Galaxy1TB 1/Pictures. Note the fact that it's called "Galaxy1TB 1" and not "Galaxy1TB" even though it shows up in Finder as Galaxy1TB.
Using Terminal I did a cd of /Volumes and it contains Galaxy1TB and Galaxy1TB 1. Galaxy1TB 1 is the volume that is visible through Finder, and it has the iPhoto Library containing all of my old photo's. But, I checked this library, by looking through the package in Finder, and it does not contain the most recent photo import I did from the Nikon point and shoot camera. When I cd into /Volumes/Galaxy1TB there is a single directory called Pictures and it contains another directory called iPhoto Library. Navigating through the various directories in this version of the iPhoto Library I came across the recent Nikon imports.
It seems to me that, when I did the import from the Nikon, iPhoto, which was not started at the time, mounted a new Volume called Galaxy1TB (somehow the existing Volume was renamed Galaxy1TB 1) and it created a new iPhoto Library on the volume and imported the images into it. Now, when I start iPhoto, it is using this doppelganger iPhoto Library rather than the original one.
I suspect that if I restart the Mac, Galaxy1TB will revert to its original state and iPhoto will pick up the correct library. But I don't know what will happen to the library on the currently mounted Galaxy1TB. If it vanishes I will lose the photo's I just imported. I guess there is a possibility that the doppelganger Galaxy1TB will be mounted and I'll lose everything on my external hard drive! I wonder whether it's safe to rm /Volumes/Galaxy11TB through Terminal before restarting the Mac?
Anyway, any thoughts would be appreciated. This thing has got me very confused. I'm going to export the photo's I recently imported, so that I'll have copies when (if?) the library goes away after a restart. But if anyone can give me some assurance that I'm not going to lose the contents of my external drive after I restart, I'd appreciate it.