iPhoto Needs A Save Album Function

I'm trying to organize the photos from my vacation in iPhoto. Unfortunately, iPhoto keeps on crashing on me. The first time it crashed, I had placed all the vacation photos in a new album, gone through and rotated all the ones sitting on their side clockwise once to bring them upright, and added names, keywords, and stars to about two thirds of the pics. After it crashed and relaunched, iPhoto managed to forget all the keywords, names, and stars, iPhoto forgot that I had ever created a Photo Album called "Turks and Caicos," and all the pics that I had flipped to stand up correctly were oddly distorted. I had to select each of these and choose revert to original.

This was frustrating, to say the least, but then it became much more frustrating when iPhoto continued to crash. I'm up to 5 crashes so far. Each time I make a certain amount of progress, I close the application, then relaunch it, to ensure that it doesn't "forget" the changes I've been making. Very slow. Very annoying. I want a "Save Album" function in the menu. In any case, if this crashing keeps happening, I see myself very quickly switching away from iPhoto and to a more functional photo management system.