freezing during uploading in iphoto!

ive had my macbookpro for about a year and a half at this point, and no real problems. i always upload photos from my canon digital SLR into iphoto, and today for some reason on one specific photo, the upload kept freezing. i rebooted, forced quit, etc. none of that worked.

i deleted the photo and tried again- it only froze on the photo before the previous one. so i deleted the one after, thinking perhaps that was the problem. nope.

so now im just short some pictures i actually liked and this thing is still freezing. ive read of options to upload to a folder then iphoto, but my camera does not show up as accessible hardware anywhere... so from what i can tell, i cant do that unless i go purchase card readers and the whole lot, but that seems ridiculous as this has worked for well over a year, and on my powerbook before this.

any suggestions?