How can I split a large library without days of tedious work???

Question

I've been reading other discussions for a few hours but feel my situation warrents a new discussion to see if anyone can help.
I've been using iPhoto for many years. I've been using a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo 2007 era iMac the whole time. I'm now using iPhoto v8.1.2. Running OSX 10.6.8.
My iPhoto library is now quite large with about 40,000 photos and about 175 G in total size. I have put a lot of time into organizing the photos. Everything is religiously backed up.
Over the past year or so the performance of iPhoto in terms of speed has been slowly declining. It takes a long time to open, but the most cumbersome is the spinning beach ball when I "commit" to enhancements to a photo I've made (contrast, saturation, sharpness etc). Recently that beach ball could actually take 3-5 minutes. I find this intolerable.
So I started researching this to see if others have the problem. As best I can make out after a few hours of research is that my library is too large and my computer too old. I don't want to replace my computer becuase of iPhoto so I started researching the idea of splitting my library into smaller libraries.
I found several 3rd party programs (iPhoto Buddy, iPhoto Library Manager) that made it seem they may be able to help me easily split my library into several libraries. Unfortunately neither actually does this but instead tells you how you need to do that manually.
The methods to split your library manually they suggest are horrendously tedious for a 40,000 photo library with over 1,300 carefully constructed Events.
And this brings me to where I stand today. I copy my entire library to an external hard drive, open the copied library and what I WANT to do is prune it to say 1/10 of the size (say two years of my photos). (Realize I'll have to do this process of copying my entire library 10 times, and pruning each time.)
But then I find out that iPhoto totally chokes when you try to trash more than "80-100" photos at a time! Morever, I come to find out that emptying the trash of even 80 photos takes 3-5 minutes!
Although I appreciate the help and advice, perhaps you can understand my frustration with Apple. I'm literally an indentured servant to iPhoto if I want to preserve all the work I've done on my library. I'd switch to another program if it would preserve all my events but I can not find one that does.
1. The performance of their software declines with no warning to the point where it can't be used unless you're unemployed and have nothing else to do.
2. You look for a fix and find you have to split your library.
3. When you try to split your library you find it will takes days and days of tedious work to complete.
So that is my story. That is why I'm so angry with Apple.
Have I missed anything or am I doomed to this dreary work?
Thank you for any help and guidance you can provide.

Answer 1

My next move would be to rebuild with Library Manager:
note the caveats:
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. (In Library Manager it's the FIle -> Rebuild command)
This will create an entirely new library. It will then copy (or try to) your photos and all the associated metadata and versions to this new Library, and arrange it as close as it can to what you had in the damaged Library. It does this based on information it finds in the iPhoto sharing mechanism - but that means that things not shared won't be there, so no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your events, albums and keywords, faces and places 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.  
Phoshare will still work for an older version of iPhoto like yours. The problems it reports are with iPhoto 11, and that has the same ability built-in, so making it redundant.
I'm not sure about videos, an email to either developer should answer that one for you.
Regards
TD