Using a backed-up iPhoto Library - HELP!!

Hi all. I'm looking for some guidance on how to recover photos that were recovered from a failing hard drive. My wife had a collection of digital photos that were originally imported in to Aperture 2.0. A while later, she started using iPhoto 09 for new photos. Eventually, she imported all of the photos from Aperture into iPhoto 09. Her collection is just over 2,500 photos. Well, last week, her hard drive started to act up and she asked me to back up her pics, and to do it from iPhoto as that's where the total photo collection then resided (Aperture + iPhoto). So I did, and we eventually had her hard drive repaired. After reinstalling iPhoto, I planned to just put the original saved iPhoto library that I backed up for her back into her pictures folder. I did, but now, when we open iPhoto, we are presented with the error message "unable to locate original" and the options are "cancel" or "locate original." So now you see our delimma (the originals went away with the bad hard drive).
Can someone please advise as to how to proceed? All of the photos are there, in the copied library, however, we are unable to use them as they are. Is there a way to convert them so they will work (hopefully without loosing all of their new attributes, e.g. "place", "faces", etc.)
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Regards, bamarich.

What do you mean when you say:
All of the photos are there, in the copied library, however, we are unable to use them as they are.
and
So now you see our delimma (the originals went away with the bad hard drive).
It sounds like iPhoto was running in Referenced mode.* Was it?
If the actual photos “went away with the bad hard drive“ then they are gone.
Regards
TD
*If you're running a Managed library, then it's the default setting, and iPhoto copies files into the iPhoto Library when Importing
If you're running a Referenced Library, then you made a change at iPhoto -> Preferences -> Advanced and iPhoto is NOT copying the files into the iPhoto Library when importing.
Regards
TD

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Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
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Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
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Hi,
I am new to this forum and after reading a lot of pages I canot find any answer to my question !!
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James
Welcome to the Apple user to user assistance forums
my iPhoto library and my files with originals photos wich have not been "imported" into iPhoto : menu "prefs/advanced/Import/copy in the iPhoto library is not checked".
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LN
Message was edited by: LarryHN

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Using a backed-up iPhoto Library - HELP!!

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