Help! One big mess!!

Hello,
I desperately need help with the mess that I have made in iphoto.

Here's the low-down:

For many years I worked on my perfectly organised iphoto library - with tagged photos, smart folders, you name it.

Then one day my powerbook started acting up and so I did an entire back up using .mac back-up software. Then low and behold one week later my hard drive died and I had to have a new one installed, along with complete new system instalment. The guys who installed the hard drive managed to save some of what was on the broken hard drive, including the iphoto library.

So; I imported all the photos from the iphoto folder that had been saved. And it imported everything - ALL the thumbnails, and of course none of the smart folders, tags etc.

Now I have a stupid amount of photos; over 16,000 that are impossible to sort. Including sometimes up to five or six duplicates! It's HORRIBLE - and iphoto runs DEAD slow!

Of course I have added new photos since then too just to complicate matters.

What I want to know now is what to do??!!

I would like to delete everything that I imported up until the day I made that back-up. (After that its all new photos)

I would like to save all the new photos.

And then I would like to re-import the old original photos from the back-up that I made including smart folders, tags etc.

I don't know how to extract stuff from the back-up folder and then I wouldn't know how to import the photos properly either.

I hope this makes some sort of sense!!!


So can anyone help??? :-/



Nicole in Berlin.