IPhoto quite buggy

Question

Okay so I've been doing some intense iPhoto work (well, not really)... I just have about 800 pictures that I've been adding faces to, finding them on maps, and organizing them into events (I transferred these from an old Mac so they weren't organized at all). It was working fine for a while... but after a period of time when I tried to split photos from events to make them into their own event... the event wouldn't appear in the list (it was as if I deleted the photos... they were nowhere to be found) so I just control-Z'd it to bring the event back to a whole. So I closed iPhoto via force quit since when I clicked the red "x" it didn't quit... rebooted the application, and then fortunately I was able to edit fine and split events. However, upon closing it again... the app froze (well, the app still worked I think but the red yellow and green bubbles were frozen) and so I had to force quit it again.
So my questions are: do I need to worry that I've lost or may lose some photos?
Is iPhoto '09 unreliable and should I do something about it? I don't like that I've had to force quit it
twice in a row and that it simply stopped working over time

Answer 1

This seems to be a bug in iPhoto 8.0.4 that is triggering some kind of corruption to iPhoto libraries that can't be corrected via the usual rebuilds, etc. See the thread "Iphoto won't delete photos properly and then can only force quit to exit" for additional detail.
Right now the only immediate solution is to do a manual import of your Originals into a new library (or use one of the shareware/freeware tools that will essentially do that for you)...but in doing this you will lose all of your Albums, Faces , etc, so depending on how much of that kind of metadata you have in your library, that could be an extremely drastic step for you.
Personally, I'm holding out a bit to see what Apple comes up with, because doing all the Faces and Albums over again would be a Very Big Deal for me....there's hours and hours of work there that I'd rather not lose except as a last resort.