iPhoto greying out photos

pigeonpie

iPhoto 9 - installed May 2010 as part of snow leopard - greys out my photo thumbnails while I am trying to organise my photos. One minute the photo thumbnail's there, the next minute a whole bunch of photos is greyed out..and I presume lost.

I only have 2Gb space left on the hdd and am trying to go through all my 1000s of photos, deleting those that I don't want.
I detest the iPhoto software but can't see any way to use anything else on the mac - I have an old (07) MBPro.

Apple store genius bar bloke said he does not know why this is happening.

Questions please - what can I do? How do I use other software than iPhoto on a mac? iPhoto is so dominant.
I am not techie minded (the whole idea was macs are easy to use..) so please could you explain simply if you have ideas I can try.
Many of my photos are very precious. They are backed up to an external hdd but I can't copy them to DVD or CD while this greying out is going on.
I am getting too nervous to open iPhoto at all - they disappear before my eyes. Help.
thank you

chorlton

There is an app called "iPhoto Library Manager" which will rebuild/repair the library. (Costs about £15)
Then you can use same app to split your one big library into several smaller ones. I am not that techie and managed it when mine went grey!
(My guess is that iPhoto doesn't like full drive/big library because that was the situation I had too - splitting up into smaller libraries did the trick)

Picasa would be the obvious alternative to iPhoto but i haven't tried it.
You'll have to delete a LOT of photos to free up any significant drive space... if you have any movies i'd get rid of them first!

pigeonpie

I'll have a look, thanks. I don't want to delete any more video clips as all I have left are of my cat before he died. I have backed them up to an external hdd but wanted to put them on DVD or CD but daren't do it.
I think there's been some duplication of photos or even folders, but can't get into iPhoto for long enough to check, as it just greys out/auto-deletes my photos.
The trouble also seems to be just trusting iPhoto to save all your digital camera photos in the size that it chooses. Again, can't get in to resize even if I knew how to do so across the board.....