Recovering all the lost photos after iPhoto 11 destroyed my iLife!!!!!

Question

So here I am trying to import 10,000 photos back onto my overcrowded harddrive on a macbook because iPhoto doesn't like external drives.   I am so ****** at Apple for dumping this piece of crap on us all.  I tried to save space by moving iPhoto library onto an external drive (yes, TD, it was Mac Extended Journal, but no it was not a hard drive stuck into my macbook, it was a perfectly legitimate GoFlex Max drive on etherneted to my home network.  For crissake it works for Time Machine, why not iPhoto. 
The clearest thing I can figure out is the the team that dumped this crap on the market were the interns while everyone else was working on iCloud.  Well, guess what, folks, if you can't figure how to share static photographs over a home network, why would you ever think I would trust my photos on the iCloud.
Thanks.  I'm just hoping that between Time Machine and a little luck and can recover nearly a decade of photographs.

Answer 1

Terence, my question is how do I recover a decade's worth of photographs accumulated through several generations of iPhoto that have now been corrupted by iPhoto 11.  I have had numerous problems with iPhoto 11 since upgrading with the latest iLife package.  My Macbook runs on 10.6.8, and has a 250GB HD.  My first problems were encountered after upgrading were phantom events with grey boxes where about two dozen photos from about 2000 once were.  After struggling to find out why the thumbnails disappeared, and several attempts to rebuild the library, I gave up.  Since 10,000 photos was taking up a chunk of my harddrive, I next decided that moving it to an external drive might solve space problems, so I followed instructions on moving an iPhoto Library to an external drive.  In this case, I used a GoFlexHome NAS (Mac formatted) which is ethernet connected to a Verizon FiOS router and used a wireless connection to move it from the Macbook to the GoFlex.  It took an overnight move, but it worked for several weeks.  I could work with photos.  After the last iPhoto update, I encountered several more mysterious problems.  I imported 22 jpeg photos from a small Nikon Coolpix and they would show up in Photos and Last Import, but not in my Events.  This evening I realized that the last update of iPhoto rearranged Events to "Manual" rather than "by date," so in fact, the Events were there.  After reading cautions in the past few days that the external drive could not be a network drive and had to be hardwired to the macbook, I am now attempting to get the photos back on my crowded black Macbook, where I hope to regain uncorrupted access to my photos.  My problem is that there are so many photos, it now says I don't have enough room on my macbook:  86GB of data in the iPhoto Library on the GoFlex, and only 79 GB on my macbook. 
I am a disappointed that this last version of iPhoto has had so many problems, hence more of a rant than a question.  Any advise you or others could offer would be welcome.