HELP!  24,700 photos - can I/should I merge iPhoto libraries?

I've been using iPhoto Buddy for a couple of years now to manage 3 different iPhoto libraries. I have coming up on 25,000 photos going back to 96 with my first digital camera. This has become a real pain switching libraries. Also - it limits how I can distribute the content (i.e. AppleTV/iTunes will only look at one library) I seperated them a while back because iPhoto wasn't stable enough to handle too many pictures in a single library without being prone to crashes.
I know nobody really knows if iPhoto 8 will help in this area (as I do plan to soon get a new 24" iMac)... but in general, is there any way to merge all 3 libraries and preserve keywords, film rolls, etc?

Apple deleted (record time!) my post on the merge topic, see the text below. (I omitted a few lines that might have pushed Apple's hypervigilant complaint monitoring team over the line, the full text is on "Gordon's Tech".
I spent some time over lunch with iPhoto 7. It's a good improvement and well worth what I paid to buy a copy. There is NO SUPPORT for library merging, but the .Mac support is better. You may be able to publish albums to .Mac and then import at the album level. Obviously, this is not satisfactory.
In my post below I comment on iPhoto Library Manager, an app I greatly appreciate and admire but which does not meet my requirements completely. I think Apple's unofficial answer is "buy Aperture", but you should know Aperture does not allow you to edit date metadata (so you can't sort scans, for example).
You're traveling with your MacBook. Organizing photos, adding metadata, creating albums, slideshows, etc. You get home. You want to import your travel library to the main library, preserving ALL the versions and metadata.
You have just married the Mac Geek of your dreams. You need to merge Libraries into the shared folder (which can't be shared over a network, but let's just ignore that). How do you do that?
You created and used separate Libraries back with iPhoto bogged down at 2000 images. Now you want to combine them, preserving version relationships, album relationships, descriptions, titles, keywords, roll information, photo books, slideshows, etc, etc.
Yes, I know about iPhoto Library Manager. I license and use it. It does miracles with Apple's limited merge support, but some metadata is lost. I also had so many issues with earlier version merges that, even though I use it all the time, I'm gun-shy. Sorry, merging Libraries is very complex. It's hard to believe that anyone but Apple can do it safely.
iLife 2008 (iPhoto 7) is the fourth release in a row to disappoint those of us asking for Library management....
tags: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, import, merge, combine, library

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