Problems in iPhoto after rebuild

[Lucia]

am running OS 10.6.4 on a MacBookPro.

I was running very low on memory and other problems associated with iphoto (such as the beach ball, needing to force quit occasionally, quitting unexpectedly and a very few grey squares).

I have moved my iphoto library off my laptop & onto an external hard drive but was still finding that things ran very slowly & the dreaded beach ball kept popping up.

So, I did a rebuild, following instructions on the apple website. Now all my files in iphoto come up at the grey squares.

Was it something I did in the rebuild? Is there a way to reverse the rebuild?

I do have the original iphoto still on my laptop (renamed iphoto old) so I have not lost everything, but it takes forever to copy over to my external hdd and I would like to know what I did wrong so I don't do it again.

And if I do need to start from scratch again, what can I do to speed up the iphoto program apart from delete all the old photos off my laptop to give my computer more memory?

 

[Lucia]

Update:

I have just realized that I had in fact deleted the old iphoto library from my hard drive. I do have it on time machine so no big problem there.

The remaining problem seems to be more an issue of running slow. I can load the library from my external hard drive (different to that which has my time machine back-up) but it takes a very long time.

iPhoto itself is on my computer but as I have 176GB of 249GB memory free I can't imagine I need to clear any further space for "working memory".

So why is iTunes running slowly and still showing some grey square thumbnails only (although given time I realize that these may load)?

Any advice greatly appreciated.