To find out if it is your pictures or iPhoto, I would download a program called GIMP and try opening a few of them in that program. It is far more complex than what your looking to do ultimately. but it can tell us wether your problem is with iPhoto or with the jpg's themselves.

Let us know what you find.
Jason

Seem that iPhoto cant' recognize properly the pic format you used to store the photos. To just see the photos you can use the viewer (it comes with OS X, so surely you already have it in your hard disk).

GIMP is an open-source program just as flexible and powerfull as Photoshop; viewer serves just as -well- a viewer, but GIMP will let you do what you need with any image.

Israel.

Thanks, Jason and Israel, for your suggestions. I can't find a viewer even using Spotlight searcher tool, and 'Preview' doesn't help, so I'll download GIMP and let you know what happens.

Best wishes, Jane

Jane,
Jason and Israel's suggestions should help you import your pictures.

More information would be helpful. Are you importing those images from a CD, from another hard drive, from a Windows machine?

Most of the time it's an issue with the format. Once you're successful in importing those images, add some keywords and then really learn to use iPhoto to get yourself organized.

I have some tips about using iPhoto on this post of my blog.

Hello again - I've had a look at GIMP and when I open certain photos (quite a lot!) there are up to 3 messages:
Corrupt jpeg data: premature end of date segment

- Unsupported marker type OX2e - or sometimes: invalid jpeg file structure: 2 SOF markers

Raw image plug-in could not open message

The thing is, I can see all the photo in the little preview version!

Any advice? I've successfully downloaded my latest photos to iPhoto and it reads them all. I have an antivirus thing but this hasn't picked up these corruptions.

Janells

Seems the JPG pictures have a corrupted format. I'm no graphic designer, but I think there should be programs somewhere to fix the format of image files.

Thanks Laureano - yes, I would hope so. One other thought is that I need to download 'vuescan' which will apparently re-enable my scanner, so maybe that has something to do with it, though the photos that can't wholly be seen weren't scanned.. just that the software that came with the scanner - Corel - can't be used on my new Mac because of Intel chip.
Thanks anyway - Jane

Did you import your images from your camera digital card w/ a USB card reader
OR did import with your camera connected to your Mac?
What version of OS X are your using? Leopard? If using the latter make sure you have checked for software updates --there have been some updates for iPhoto.
Finally, make sure you check in the whole iPhoto library for your photos---they are stored there until you start arranging them in to projects.
Hope this might help --I don;t think you need any extra software Iphoto is pretty good on its own!