I have no clue what caused this but the fact was that iPhoto crashed right away after launch. Maybe it was recent update to OS X 10.6.3 - who knows. But the main point was how to get it running again.
I was not too worried about photos as I have Time Machine taking backups automatically. But the last backup was two days old because the backup hard drive was offline. Some photos were imported after that so I decided to rebuild the iPhoto library instead of taking it from the backup.
There is a handy tool called iPhoto Library Manager which allows to rebuild the library without touching the original. The small issue with this was the size of my iPhoto library. 147GB was more than I had space on my internal hard drive. But the tool can create a rebuilt library on external drives as well so my 1TB backup drive solved this.
The process of the library rebuilding is slow and takes several hours with a large library. My 1TB backup drive is slow and USB2 drive so no wonder. After I checked and tested the new library I replaced the original with the rebuilt.
Having a recent backup saved me from freaking out but I think the library has gotten too big in any case. I also think that iPhoto '08 is not really the right program for storing raw photos in such quantities. Aperture 3 looks interesting - maybe I'll try the free trial.
