Recovering backed up iPhoto contents after hard drive crash

Our hard drive crashed two weeks ago, but we had used apple's Backup program, to back up everything on our external hard drive. Now we have the new hard drive installed, and I tried to recover our iPhoto library. When I opened up iPhoto for the first time, it said that I needed to upgrade, so I did. Now, I can see all of my original albums listed, but when all that appears in the right window is a square with a dotted line along it. When I double click that frame, I get a black box with an exclamation point in in.
In trying to restore things, I dragged the folders from my house icon on the external hard drive, into the new house icon. For example, I dragged our Pictures file into the new house icon, and apparently replaced the one that was there.
Please help. It will be tragic if we can't recover our photos.

Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.
Regards
TD

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vonilee
Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
It's unlikely that re-installing the app will help here, the problem is with the library. Before you restored, you had to back up? What did you back up and how did you do it?
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Recovering backed up iPhoto contents after hard drive crash

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