IPhoto 11 not saving imported iPhone 3GS pics after exit

Question

My wife and I both import photos form our iPhone 3GS's into iPhoto 11 (9.1 (475)). Since we want to save them in the same photo library, I moved the iPhoto Library some time ago to my Public folder, so we can both post to it. This has worked fine until installing iPhoto '11. When she imports from her phone, iPhoto says it has imported, and you can see the new pics. When she exits iPhoto, it gives a quick progress bar saying the iPhoto Library is being updated. Then, reopen iPhoto -- the new imported pics are gone. Have repaired permissions, hasn't made a difference. Any ideas please?
Thanks,
Patrick

Answer 1

Okay, I've done some more playing around and have had some success with retrieving lost photos.
I did a reveal in finder on a picture that imported from photo booth. It appears that iPhoto '11 has changed the way pictures are stored in the iPhoto library. Instead of being in a folder named the date of the import, there was an "11" folder inside of the "2010" folder that I'm assuming represents November. Inside of that were folders with various numbers that I believe are the days of the month the import was done. Inside of these, I found various folders. Some of these contained the original photos from our camera and retained the name that our camera gives them (begins with "IMG_"). Other photos in these folders had long numerical names and seemed to be photos that either my wife or I had previously published to facebook through iPhoto.
I created a new folder in my home directory in Finder and copied all the original "IMG_" files from the folders that I found. I then did an Import in iPhoto of these copied files, named the events and closed iPhoto. For whatever reason, this time, when I reopened iPhoto, they were still there.
So, this brings up several questions about what's going on. Is iPhoto only loosing pictures imported from the SD card? Is it only loosing pictures that are imported and then immediately uploaded to facebook? Is it loosing pictures that are imported and not given an event name? If we copy the files from the SD card to the Mac's hard drive first and then import, will we not see this problem?
All valid questions that will take some experimenting to do, but maybe what I've found so far will help others recover the photos that aren't showing up for them.