MacBook Pro iphoto external HDD and can't open iphoto.

I have a Macbook Pro OS X 10.9.2 and I cannot open iphoto. My HD has 0 kb free. Is this why? It worked yesterday and I haven't uploaded anything new, just attached a WD my passport ext HD and did a time machine back up. I can't locate the Iphoto backup on the external HDD. When I attempt to open iphoto I get an error message - Unable to write to library "iphoto library". Its got around 850GB of photos in there. Plan was to back up time machine on one HDD, then just the actual photo files to another HDD and store old photos on the external drives, thus freeing up my MacBook Pro.
I have a copy of time machine from about 2 weeks ago which is when my old external drive ran out of space. The new drives are WD My Passport for Mac 2TB.
I've tried holding down the cmd-alt buttons and can get the menus up but if I click 'repair database' I get the same error message up.
Any ideas?
I have dragged the iphoto library from finder, which is showing around 850GB, to the WD HDD and its backing up but very slowly!!
If I can get iphoto open I can get some photos off of it which no doubt will solve the problem!!

The ext HD is not partitioned. It also has a Time Machine back up on it
You don't want to run an iPhoto library off the same drive/partition the Time Machine uses. It will eventually run of of space and damage the library. Running a library in that manner is asking for problems.
Should I (can I?) rename one of the iphoto libraries so I know which is which?
Yes. Then if you're not sure which library you're using Control (right) - click on the iPhoto title in the top frame of the window to see which library it is:
What is the best way to keep my photos backed up on an ext HD before/ after editing as I want to keep the original as well as the edited version.
That's what iPhoto does. When you edit a photo the edits are applied to a modified version separate from the original/master version. iPhoto has a Revert to Original option which removes the edited version. Also when viewing an edited photo in the edit mode the Shift key will toggle between the edited version and orignal version.
Any ideas if it is easy to extract my music from itunes from time machine back up?
Enter Time Machine, go to the Music folder or wherever you kept your iTunes library, select the library and click on the Restore button. It will be restored to the Music folder on your boot drive. If you want to restore the library to another location Control (right) - click on the iTunes library and select "Restore to .....". That will let you pick the location for the restored library.
am thinking of getting LIghtroom to use instead of iphoto but have no idea whether it would talk to the photos that are in iphoto on my ext HD. Perhaps Aperture would make more sense?
Lightroom works alot like iPhoto and Aperture, a database based application. You can't use both Lightroom and iPhoto. You'll have to pick one and use it alone.
However, Aperture can use the same library as iPhoto so there would be no converting the library as LIghtroom would require.
Your best solution would be to daisy chain another EHD off of your TM hard drive to use with your iPhoto and iTunes libraries and any other files you'd like to keep there to use. Then have TM backup both your boot drive and the second EHD. The TM drive should be about 2X the size of the drives it's backing up.
So if you go that route you might want to get a new EHD for TM that's big enough and use the current TM drive as your working drive.

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