IPhoto 5 Just Won't Import Backed-up Pics

For the past 5 years or so, I've been working on a Dell Inspiron 2500, and just purchased a new Powerbook last week. I love this thing more than I can describe, but was greatly disappointed when I met my photo-organizing companion for this first foray into the world of Apple, iPhoto.
On my Dell, I had been using Google's Picasa2 program to touch-up and organize my photos. (It was a wonderful experience, and it's really unfortunate that there is no Mac version availiable.) I had been using the program to back-up my pictures on an external hard drive, and eventually had my whole photo collection on there.
Then, when I got my Powerbook, I loaded all the pictures from the external hard drive onto my Powerbook hard drive. It went brilliantly fast (I never had used USB 2.0 before!) Soon, I had all my Picasa2 backed-up photos on my new Powerbook.
This is when things went sour. I opened up iPhoto, and began dragging folders from /Documents into empty albums. An error message came up (I have a screenshot stored here: http://standrewsoca.org/screenshot1.jpg ) telling me that I could not add my pictures because they were an unrecognizable file type.
This would make sense if, say, I was shooting RAW, but these were just .JPGs. I could even open them in Preview. But no matter what, I could not get them to load into iPhoto - with a few random exceptions. Some files would load, but there was no understandable reason why they would, and the majority wouldn't. They're all taken with the same camera (Nikon D70) that was shooting straight to .JPG.
My only hypothesis is that Picasa2 somehow bastardized the .JPG files with the special editing tags that it uses to keep track of edits, in order to preserve the original, and so iPhoto can't read these files. Is this feasible?
Also, a second question... is there any way to order Albums in that sidebar chronologically, or is the only method of ordering them alphabetical?
Thank so much!
15" Powerbook G4 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.3) Nikon D70, 14" Dell Inspiron 2500 900 MHz

Hi Nilus,
You made the mistake of manually putting your folder of images into the iPhoto Library folder in the Finder.
Drag the folders you put in there to the desktop. Now drag them into an open iPhoto viewing window (the window on the right that shows all the images in your library.
Lori

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