Events mixed up and deleted photos are back after database rebuild

Question

Hello
My father has got an iPhoto library with rougly 6200 pictures in it. One day I decided, as the old iMac he uses grew more sluggish, to rebuild the database, in an attempt to get a performance boost out of it.
So I opened iPhoto holding the cmd and the alt keys on the keyboard. There I got four options out of which at first I chose "repair database" and after that I restarted iPhoto and selected "rebuild database".
After that my father got shocked and I myself, too, since I couldn't explain him what happened:
It seems as if every picture from over 1000 photos that he put into the trash (AND we emptied the trash!) are back and strewn randomly across dozens of events. Thus if he had like six pictures of the same motiv out of which he picked one to keep, in that case all six are back!
Furthermore many many pictures are at complete wrong events now. Some pictures from one event are now at some completely unrelated other ones.
Thus the whole library is mixed up.
My father also fears that some pictures might be missing, but this is one of the only things I'm confident about, that there should be at least all pictures somewhere.
Now what did I do?
1. I fired up Time Machine and restored from a three days old backup. What happened now is: NOTHING. There were two new pictures which he added in that three days thus these two picutres were gone. But the whole problem was still there. Unchanged. How? It was a bloody restore.
2. I restored from an older backup. Same.
3. I repaired the database. No change.
4. I rebuild the database. No change.
I can't tell my father to sit down and reorder 6000 pictures by hand, which he has done for several years, all over again. What are my options? What can I do? Please help!
Thank you

Answer 1

Are you saying that the photos are appearing in the wrong albums, or that the photos are in their correct albums but are displayed in the different order within them ? If they are in the wrong albums then try deleting the photo cache from your computer and re-try the sync - the location of the cache, and how to delete it, is on this page http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1314
If the photos are displayed in the wrong order in the albums, then they will be displayed by capture date order unless you are syncing via iPhoto or Aperture on a Mac. To get them in a different order you will need to manipulate their capture dates : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4221