[Leica] OT! iPhoto thinks he LOST 2000 of my vaca photos!!

[shino at panix.com (Rei Shinozuka)]

OT! question, only posted here because i know there are several iPhoto
users on the list, and because i am suffering from a bit of emergency.

i am on vacation in maui and a couple of strange things happened.  one was
that i imported from the camera.  a little later, i noticed the clocks
were off and i set to hawaiian time.  then i noticed the files i 
recently uploaded were no longer visible in iPhoto.  i figured maybe
the files were somehow in the future and iPhoto was confused.  so i
reimported them.  this was somewhat disturbing, but not compared to what
happened later.  the next day, i was busily downloading from my wife's
camera to her ibook.  the thing somehow managed to log out.  i logged
back in, and redownloaded the data.  everything looked fine.

now i am a paranoid sort, so i never delete the card data until i see it
on the computer, and then only after i exit iPhoto and come back in.
sure enough my paranoia was well-founded, when i came back in, iphoto
had ZERO photos, when there were about 1,800 images before.  a heart-stopping
moment.  now i am afriad of importing any new files from the camera
into the empty archive.

when i look at ${HOME}/Pictures/iPhoto Library i will see the 2002, 2003
and 2004 directories and the correct subdirectories for months and dates.
in short, it looks like all the jpegs are there.  Doing a:

mjshino% du -s iPhoto\ Library/
5192144 iPhoto Library/

shows that there is a large amount of data there and spot-checking 
indicates my photos are unmolested.


I do notice that ${HOME}/Pictures/iPhoto Library
files like AlbumData.xml and such are much smaller than usual:

-rw-r--r--   1 mjshino  wheel    4481 Aug 27 11:02 AlbumData.xml
drwxr-xr-x  20 mjshino  staff     680 Aug 27 11:05 Albums
-rw-r--r--   1 mjshino  staff    5406 Aug 27 11:02 Dir.data
-rw-r--r--   1 mjshino  staff  772988 Dec 26  2002 Library.cache
-rw-r--r--   1 mjshino  staff   11259 Aug 27 11:02 Library.data

does anyone know how to force iPhoto to recognize the files already
in its heirarchy or to "repair" its state?

the iPhoto in question was 2.0.1, though in desparation (AFTER all the
files appeared missing), i uninstalled it and downloaded iPhoto 2.0.0 
from apple.

the only known sin i may have committed is allowing the ibook to run low
on disk space (a measly 20GB drive). about 500MB free.

thanks for any advice!!

-rei

p.s. now i am in dutch with the wife, "spending all my time on the
     damned computer even in a tropical resort."  

     i nod toward my MP0.85 and M6 classic and mutter that they sit silently 
     in their bag at the end of the day, stoic and ready for work.

-- 
Rei Shinozuka shino@panix.com
Ridgewood, New Jersey