I can't find most of my photos in iPhoto

Question

MacPro 3.1, OSX 10.6.8, iPhoto 7.1.5
I had connected my iPod Touch to my MacPro to upload photos to iPhoto.  It transferred some photos, but then with 8 left to do it didn't progress any further, and finally gave me a bunch of error messages. I tried closing and reopening iPhoto, and got a message that the computer couldn't open iPhoto because it couldn't find my iPhoto library.  I did a search and found that I had an iPhoto library in my "Pictures" folder, but when I selected that to open, what opened was a very old library with only a few pictures from early 2011.  I had hundreds of photos and albums since then, but none of them show up.  Is there a way of getting back my photos?  If that isn't possible, I do have a backup of my hard drive (a cloned copy using SuperDuper) on a separate external drive - when I boot up from that drive, my most recently saved iPhotos are all there.  Is there a way I can import the iPhoto library from my backup drive to my main computer drive?  I tried opening iPhoto from my main drive using the iPhoto library from the backup drive (by opening iPhoto with the option key held down, and then selecting the iPhoto library on the backup drive), but what opened was just the very old library.
Today I discovered something that may or may not be related.  When I opened my computer to add something to iCal, iCal was nowhere to be found.  It had always been in my Applications folder, and I have never had a problem with it before.  I did a spotlight search for iCal, and nothing showed up.  I noticed that I did have an iCal icon in the applications folder of the backup drive, but when I started up from the backup drive and tried to open iCal, I got a message that the application had unexpectedly quit.  I don't look at iCal frequently, so am not sure if this happened at the same time that I lost my iPhoto library, or afterwards.
In any case, it's rather disconcerting. 

Answer 1

Thanks for the response.  I had tried that, and no, it didn't open up my missing albums and pictures. Very strange. I finally went to Apple support and paid $19 for single incident support - after some preliminary attempts, the support person took over my computer and then we spent over two hours trying all kinds of things.  And yes, we did finally get the pictures back, but we did so many things that I can't really say how we did it !
But again, thanks for the response.  Still haven't been able to find my missing iCal (tried reloading the 10.6.8 update combo from the Apple website, but that didn't relaod the application.  We found all the iCal info that's still on the computer, but not the application itself).
- Tom Valens
    Tamalpais Productions