Loss of photos in iphoto 6

hello all,
I have read around but can't see anything directly relevant, so apologies if this has been answered before.
I opened iphoto 6, which crashed almost immediately, resulting in the photo library corrupting. Since this has happened (many times) before, I had a copy, so (after copying that) I renamed the file and opened iphoto again. This seemed fine, until I began importing pictures, when the thumbnails showed only empty spaces where some of the new photos should be. It then became stuck, so I had to 'Forced quit', and when I restarted my computer and opened it again, all the photos were gone. Now, even if I replace the library6iphoto with an old version claiming to have 100mB or so of content, when I open iphoto, I get a dialogue box saying I have to update the thumbnails. No matter whether I press the '`later' or the upgrade now caption, the upgrade takes 1 second, as i seem to have no photos in the file.
I have various library6.iphoto copies, but every time I have tried to open them, the files have reduced to 4kb in content and no pictures are there.
Any ideas?

LN
Thanks for the quick reply, but as yet no joy.
I have the iphoto library folder, - shows about 12.5 GB. Inside is the library6.iPhoto database file (claiming to have 4mb content) and various copies I made as backup - which claim around 100 mb of content. The photos - modified and original - all seem to be there. Previously, I was told in a shop to fix this problem by removing the corrupt library6 file and renaming a previously made copy. This has usually worked fine. Not, however, this time, as all this does is reduce the renamed copy to 4 mb.
I tried "depressing the option (alt) key and use the select library option to be sure you are pointing at the library that we just verified had your photos" but no photos materialised! I then "launched iPhoto while depressing the option and command (apple) keys - selecting the first three options of the rebuild library dialogue" but still no photos appeared.
I have downloaded the iphotolibrary manager, but it just crashes every time I open it, so haven't been able to do much with that. I have around 5GB of memory available - could this be the problem?
Rather more worryingly, I then tried to create a whole new library from scratch, reloading selected photos from a disk. They seemed to load fine - all the thumbnails flashed through as it imported and so on, but when it came to actually seeing the library, heaps of the pictures were merely blank dotted squares. More of them had disappeared when I restarted my computer - from about 500 there are only some 3 left now. When I check the original photos in this new iphotolibrary folder, they cannot be opened there either. So, I checked the photos were okay on the CD - they are. Yet, when I uploaded them to the computer merely into a desktop folder, several seem to be corrupted or a file format that preview doesn't recognize.
I have a complete back up of my iphoto library folder on an external disk, but am rather worried about trying to reload from that incase I have something more sinister happening with my mac, since when i restarted a moment ago, my dock 'lost' various files...nothing really was gone, so it was easy to put the icons back, but I am wondering if I have a wider problem.
Sorry if this all seems garbled nonsense!
V

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Hi there,
If all else fails, you can try this...
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Good Afternoon All,
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Morning Terence
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I can still drag and drop a SINGLE photo effectively and it saves in the edited form. I also tried selecting the desired photos, chosing copy and then paste in the desired location in finder. But when I chose 'paste' (right click, paste; or edit, paste) in the desired location, it only pastes a limited selection of the photos which I chose to copy. Not all the photos copy across.
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It's curious that the resulting file size from 'export, current' is different (larger in the example I just tried) in comparison to that resulting from 'export, jpeg' (with either the medium or high option selected).
OK there seems to be a couple of reasonable options available although neither is as nice as the simple 'drag and drop' which used to be available!!! Why would they remove that option?? (and yet not for single files?).
Thanks
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Y can t losse this material=. It' s extremely important for me. Work Stuff !!!

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i Brian
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1 - this is the iPhoto '08 forum - your question would be better placed in the iPhoto 5 forum - http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=850 - some things work differently and here people will assume that you have iPhoto '08 and the answers may not work on iPhoto 5
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