Help!!! iphoto retrieval problems

[ginnymarie9]

My son spilled water on my macbook last year. I was able to get it back functioning enough to backup the hard drive onto an external hard drive but had to buy a new macbook pro because the internet connection would not revive. Today I tried to retrieve my old iphoto pics from the external hard drive onto my macbook pro using the option + click 'browse other back up disks' function. I successfully downloaded the 6/2012 iphoto file onto my desktop but it won't open because it says that the iphoto file transferred from my old macbook won't work on my new macbook pro OS. How am I supposed to get my photos inside the old iphoto???