iphoto lost photos

I'll try to make this short and concise:

have been happily using iPhoto on my trusty Macbook Pro since 2007 and synchronising with iPhone 4 (and now 5) for the past 2 years with no problems until now.

Basic problem is this: for no apparent reason I now seem to have lost a HEAP of photos from iPhoto.

I noticed this the other night when I transferred photos from my iPhone to the Macbook via iPhoto. I think I'm missing something in the region of 2000 photos!

Unfortuanately I don't have a backup of the iPhoto Library 😟 (Guess who's just added an external HDD to his Santa List?)

The iPhone 5 (with IOS6) had been plugged into my Macbook Pro (running OS X 10.6.8) and was charging. I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up to some pxts from friends. I saved the pics and transferred them to the Mac. I then tried to organise the photos by adding them to various albums that I use to group my photos in. At that point I noticed that one of the albums was missing a heap of photos. I confirmed this when I checked on my iPhone: the album contains 559 photos compared to 58 on the Macbook.

In iPhoto I have a number of Smart Albums that I have created based on Keyword and Rating. I then synchronise these to my iPhone. So for example I keep every photo ever taken of my son (as do all crazily besotted fathers 🙂 ) but I only synchronise the decent ones (I still only get 1 decent photo for every 40 taken!).

There's a huge difference in the number of photos now stored in iPhoto on the Mac and what's on the iPhone (655 vs 1499)

If I had somehow inadvertently deleted them I would have thought they would be in the iPhoto Trash folder but only 40 photos in there.

There doesn't seem to be any particular date from which the photos are missing: the ones left date all the way back to when I got the Macbook and also right up until I last transferred photos 2 days ago.

iPhoto tells me I have 655 photos in 35 Events.

The iPhoto Library is 61.3 GB.

So I'm hoping that the library size means that my photos are still stored in there?

I've used PhotoSync to take a backup of the pics on my iPhone and store them in a separate folder on the Macbook.

For now, I'm avoiding synchronising the iPhone via iTunes in case that removes the photos from the iPhone or permanently removes anything from iPhoto that might currently still be there but just not be openly visible. (Yup - I'm paranoid of making things worse!)

So my questions / concerns are:

1. if I synchronise my iPhone via iTunes, will I lose all of the photos on the iPhone too?
2. Does PhotoSync store the Keyword and Rating data as Meta Data within the file?
3. what can I do to find the missing photos?
4. if I find them, what can I do to restore them without creating duplicates and also without the tedious task of having to individually check 2000-odd photos?
5. if I find them, will I be able to restore them without having to re-tag them with Keywords and Ratings?

When I called Apple they told me that because my Macbook was bought in 2007 it's out of warranty and I have to pay for support, which seems a bit lame as the issue is to do with iPhoto and a 'not toooooooo old' version of the OS. So before I start forking out my hard-earned shillings, I thought I'd appeal to the wisdom of the Mac community.

Appreciate all help and advice 🙂

Cheers