Panther: Faster, iPhoto: SLOWER

[Superdrive]

I love panther! It is much faster and more effiecient than Jag and before. The trouble I run into is iPhoto being such a SLOW program. Has Apple stopped updating this program? This seems like is should be the next on the list for an update. Preferrably a speedier one, the beachball lives in iPhoto.

[howard]

i couldn't agree with you more!

how many photos are in your library? i found that if you had 1000+ photos its a pretty much useless program...needless to say i don't use it

[Macette]

iphoto is slow as... as anything. sick of it. because it's such a nice program to use, but the speed is bad.

also, camera makers have been deeply slack about making firewire / usb2 compatible cameras... why is that? it takes, like, a month for my 512MB flash card to download into iPhoto from my camera. i know i should buy a card reader, but i'm sick of having so much crap around..

[rodiger]

iphoto is slow because of the huge number of pics that must be rendered I think.

here's a way to speed it up:

goto View
click Film Rolls

each time you import a new film roll is created. if you click on the triangle it rolls up the film roll and improves the speed quite a bit.

Using the film rolls also gives you a convenient way to arrange (or at least describe) the main library cause you can label the film rolls.

[Macco]

Hmm, iPhoto is actually running faster for me. Odd...

[manitoubalck]

While Digital photography is great, call me old fashioned but I still love my SLR Pentax. There's just something about chemical photography that the digital photography can't match. In much the same way PCM audio sound so much better than MP3's.

[Superdrive]

Originally posted by howard
i found that if you had 1000+ photos its a pretty much useless program...

I am an aviation photographer and have over 3000 shots in my library. iPhoto has the right idea for a program, it is just WAAY to slow. Maybe Apple should give us a pro version come spring!

[simX]

Here's a tip that should make iPhoto run much faster if you haven't done it already:

Go to the iPhoto Preferences, and change the "Appearence" setting from "Drop Shadow" to either "Border" or "No Border". Apparently rendering those drop shadows takes a ton of time, and turning them off makes iPhoto run much faster.

[Superdrive]

Originally posted by simX
Here's a tip that should make iPhoto run much faster if you haven't done it already:

Go to the iPhoto Preferences, and change the "Appearence" setting from "Drop Shadow" to either "Border" or "No Border". Apparently rendering those drop shadows takes a ton of time, and turning them off makes iPhoto run much faster.

I have done that too. I have tried everything that looks like it could speed things up. I have submitted a beachball report to Apple. Hopefully something better comes soon.

[fraeone]

The rumors are that a new iLife will be released in January with new faster iphoto, among other things (iTunes 5). I think everybody will be happy to get their hands on that.

[brutus]

hello there,

got the same problem with panther and iphoto. Your hints helped a lot although iphoto is still quite slow as i have several thousand pics in the library.

But i still have two question:
1) Is there a better prog for osx to organize your pics?
2) how come that iphoto was much faster under jaguar?!?

[jxyama]

split your library. versiontracker -> iphoto library manager.

with split libraries, my iPhoto runs (perceptively) faster under panther than it did under jaguar.

the reason iPhoto is slow with a large library is that it tries to cache all the pictures. so the problem gets more severe with smaller RAM.

i sure hope apple will come up with an alternate way to do iPhoto... with the proliferation of digital photography, even amateur or point-and-shoot photographers are ending up with 1000+ photos.

[gwuMACaddict]

Originally posted by howard

how many photos are in your library? i found that if you had 1000+ photos its a pretty much useless program...

YES! i have over 2500 and iphoto s$%ts the bed whenever i ask it to do anything. that being said, i feel like panther helped speed my iphoto up a little. maybe this is just me imagining things though... i'd like to see an update before january- its been a while

[jxyama]

ok, i'll elaborate on how you can use iPhoto Library Manager (iPLM)...

get the app:
versiontracker link (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13532)

install.

now, the easiest way to split the existing library without messing up all the comments, albums, etc. is to simply duplicate the iPhoto Library folder under User -> Pictures.

after duplicating, use iPLM to select the duplicate folder as default, launch iPhoto, trim the library/albums until the data in the library is comfortably below your RAM.

for example, i use a 3MP camera at the highest settings, which results in ~1 MB per photo. i have 640 MB ram, so i usually keep around 200 to 300 pictures per split library, which, with comments and enhancements made to photos, results in about 500 MB library. i split chronologically, like 2003, 2002, etc.

repeat until all of your pictures are split.

it's a wonderful program, give it a try. it will give run your iPhoto much, much smoother than if you kept your library in one piece.

[Dont Hurt Me]

Originally posted by simX
Here's a tip that should make iPhoto run much faster if you haven't done it already:

Go to the iPhoto Preferences, and change the "Appearence" setting from "Drop Shadow" to either "Border" or "No Border". Apparently rendering those drop shadows takes a ton of time, and turning them off makes iPhoto run much faster. nice tip

[yoda13]

I think that Panther has helped iPhoto for me. I have over 2500 photos and the speed is not great, but it is not horrible either. But I am running on a machine with with a lot of RAM and drop shadows set to off. My brother runs iPhoto on his 500mhz iBook with shots from a 5 megapixel camera, and it is really slow. My camera is a four megapixel, and I have only recently gotten it. Before I was using a 2.1 camera. It seems to have gotten a little slower since I switched last spring to the bigger resoution camera. Does this make sense to anyone, or do I just have an overactive imagination?

[jxyama]

yoda13:

if you read what i posted, you'd see why.

iPhoto caches all the images in the library upon launch. when you start taking bigger images with a more MP'ed camera, the library will have more to cache.

so, no, it's not just your imagination.

seriously, folks - split the libraries... it will do wonders to the usability of iPhoto, even with 1,000+ pics!

[ITR 81]

I have around 700 photo's in iPhoto but I haven't seen a speed decrease.

[brutus]

in my case (new 12" pb with 512 MB Ram) iphoto became significantly slower with panther. dont know why but it happened.

As i turned of shadows the speed became much better but still not really fast.
Splitting the library sounds good but as i have about 5000 pics and just got a new digicam with more pixels it doesnt sound very comfortable having to change libraries very often.

there must be a better solutions, or a better program if necessary...

[Samurai Jack]

I'm glad I'm not the only with iPhoto running like a dog.

I've got a 1ghz iMac with 768mb or ram and iPhoto still takes forever to load. Once it's loaded though it's not too bad. I've pretty much resigned myself to moving my photos to CD and keeping the number of images on my system to a minimum.

I sure hope the rumors of a faster iPhoto in January pan out. I love the functionality of iPhoto but don't spend much time on it because of the performance issues.

[caveman_uk]

I use multiple libraries (with iPLM) and try to keep each one less than 600MB (about 300 photos if I've manipulated them). I find it easier to find and back up stuff with smaller multiple libraries. iPhoto stays quite responsive too.

[brutus]

i've just downloaded the library changer but to be honest, i'm not convinced. in order to change to another library you have to leave iphoto, open the iphoto library changer, change the library, go back to iphoto and continue. thats not very comfortable and takes a lot of time.

does anybody know an alternative prog to use?! my itunes manages 20 GB of data without problems. there must be an alternative as long as the speed problem with iphoto exists...

[sigamy]

I don't think you can really compare iTunes and iPhoto from that perspective. At launch all iTunes has to do is open an XML file that lists your music library's contents. This file is pure text, and not very big at all.

iPhoto is loading each image so that you can instantly view all the images in your library.

That being said, I'm also desperately waiting for a new iPhoto. Hope it comes at MWSF.

[caveman_uk]

I tend to leave the library changer open the whole time and use it to close iphoto and restart iphoto to access different libraries - takes at most 5 seconds. I take longer to take a sip of coffee.

Sadly if you want it to be smoother then that functionality must be built into iphoto not as an add-on. Either that or make iphoto faster.

On the subject of slow things iphoto starts really quickly compared to anything by adobe.:rolleyes: Starting Elements or Photoshop on an ibook takes a bit of patience...it's not exactly speedy on a powermac either.

[agreenster]

Originally posted by brutus
my itunes manages 20 GB of data without problems.

I'm very sorry, but what a STUPID comment.

iPhoto is a wonderful piece of software, but it has its limitations. Try making a 50000 x 50000 pixel image in Photoshop and it will struggle too. Displaying 2000+ images simultaneously is something only dreamt about 3 years ago, and here you are whining about it like a kid who didnt get what he wanted at christmas.

Okay, harshness aside. As explained above, iTunes and iPhoto are completely un-comparable. iTunes doesnt PLAY all the songs at once, but simply lists the songs, and plays them one at a time. iPhoto, on the other hand, DISPLAYS all the pictures from cache all at once (in the library). Its apple's and bananas.

Its a LIMITATION of hardware. You cant just 'make' iPhoto faster. (what, do you think the tech's at Apple have a button that reads, 'Make faster' that they forgot to push?)

Its not something Apple can 'fix' right away. Give them time, and they'll release a new version. But certainly dont act like iPhoto doesnt deserve any praise for being the one-of-a-kind piece of software it is.

[brutus]

no reason to get insulting!!!

besides there is no difference at all!
both progs are made to organize data!
its useless to write a library if it is incabable of dealing with an ordinary amount of pics! and as digicams get more and more pixels a single holiday produces 512 MB of date. the problem is that its organization is crap.
there is no need to "play" all pics at once!!!
itunes doesn't do it, so why does iphoto do it?!? because its not organized well!!!
its useless to mount the whole archive!!!
there are several other progz especially in the wintel world that are organized better.

so please, stop insulting me!!!

[agreenster]

Oh man. You dont know what you are talking about.

Not worth arguing.

[jxyama]

no insults needed...

regardless, iTunes and iPhoto are very similar in the intended purpose but their operational styles can't really be compared... basically, you were made fun of (to put it mildly) because you were suggesting making iPhoto to work as fast as iTunes by representing all the pictures by their filenames - a very unglamorous presentation, if you ask me.

either iPhoto caches all the pictures upon launch (slow start up then instant accessibility once loaded) or not (fast start up then having to wait for each picture to load into memory for the first access for each photo). i guess apple went for the former solution.

i think iPhoto can only be improved in terms of usability by incorporating the multiple library function. (by the way brutus, i know it's a different feel, but the gain in usability is 100% worth the trouble. do try iPLM again...) it's a great program in its concept - but the popularity of digital photography kinda caught up to not so easily fixable hardware limitations...

[etoiles]

I guess a lot of the speed hit comes from the way iPhoto handles the 'automatic' scaling of images...it would be faster just to have fixed sizes (thumb and original) but then it would lose its 'neat' charm.

I really hope to be able to switch libraries from within iPhoto in a future version...it kind of works when you put albums on external media, so I am not sure why they don't let you do it on a single harddrive.

Is anybody using the finder to organize pictures ? I can't figure out why some images have a preview as the actual icon and others just a standard 'jpg' (for example) icon. I have also had images with preview that suddenly show up as standard icons. Is there a way to create preview icons for a bunch of images in a folder ?

[sigamy]

I think everyone agrees that iPhoto is too slow today. I was wondering if someone with a PC could try Picasa, which is an iPhoto clone for the PC. Maybe someone can see how it handles large libraries. Does it load all the images at startup? Or a folder of images at a time? How is the performance overall?

http://www.lifescapeinc.com/picasa/

I know it will be very hard to compare totally different apps on different architectures but maybe this will give us an idea (and some benchmarks) on how close or far iPhoto performance is...

[sigamy]

One final suggestion is to move to iView Media Pro. It's $30 and I've heard good things about it.

I haven't tried it yet...

http://www.iview-multimedia.com/

[Chad4Mac]

If you haven't heard of iPhotoBuddy, it's something you should check out.

Check it out on Version Tracker.

It uses the multiple library idea, and it's interface is real intuitive. iPhoto is automatically lauched upon choosing specific libraries which is quite handy. I find a decent fix until Apple upgrades iPhoto.

Chad4Mac