I-Photo Sluggish

[edward-k]

I am currently running iphoto 4.0.1 w/ OSX10.3.4 on an 800mhz G4 15"Imac. I have read many articles and reviews that tout iphoto as being wonderful - personnaly I find it painfully slow. My old 1.2 P4 Dell seems to perform much snappier when it comes to viewing and editing photos. As I have 3-4 thousand photos in i-photo it takes forever to load and scroll - 1) Is there any way to make I-photo not load previews of every single picture every time it loads? 2)Is there a simple way to back up every photo by roll etc, I hate the way i-photo stores files on the hard drive 3) I have been tempted to use iphoto to touch things up then just drop them in folders on the desktop by month, however when I try to do this and turn the preview of photos on, it again is painfully slow, a folder of 40-50 photos will takes several minuites to pull up previews, again on the old PC they come up instantly. 4) finally, I am in the market for a new computer, I am looking at the 2.0 G5 vs a Dell 3.6, any thoughts when it comes to photo management? Thanks in advance for any help or insight. Ed

[BornAgainMac]

That does sound slow compared to my 450 Mhz G3 iMac. I have almost 9,000 photos and about half over 3.1 Megapixels. I have 1 GB of memory. How much memory do you have?

[Applespider]

Are you 'closing' the rolls of film in your main library?

I found that when I had them all open, iPhoto would take a while to load since it was getting previews for each one.

Now I have them closed unless I'm going into a particular roll and iPhoto has sped up accordingly. I dread backing up to a new iPhoto though since I believe you even if you burn the iPhoto library (with rolls) when it reimports to a new version, it'll be all just one jumbled mass. Perhaps I'll investigate some of those multi-library options on VersionTracker then - or hope that iPhoto 5 solves the problem!

[LANcaster]

I had a similar problem with iPhoto on my G5 where it became very sluggish. I managed to speed it up quite considerably by deleting the cache files that iPhoto creates. To do this go to the following folder in Finder: ~/Library/Caches/iPhotoCache then press Apple Key and A to select all the files and then drag them to the trash.

Don't worry; this won't have any detrimental effect on your iPhoto library and should improve performance assuming you are experiencing the same problem as I did.

Hope this helps :)

[spookykids]

Lotsa RAM truly helps, and if thats not a option turning off shadows really helps. That really beefed things up. But really, iPhoto is a drag to use if youre on anything else than a G5. iPhoto feels like a unfinished product, which it may be...

[BryanOz]

I have had a dream run with Easyshare for over a year now, same version now for that long.
I also use iPhoto, it's intergration with iMovie is superb, but as a comment to all the hassles with slow and sluggishness with iPhoto I have to agree and the crazy way it creates folders, sub folders and data files etc, whereas Kodak's Easyshare just keeps putting your images into dated folders; from whatever source, camera, CD's etc .

I suppose Kodak have a more vested interest in you being able to find, file and organize your pics especially for printing either home, via online or their stores.

Even though I have a new iMac flat screen, my advice is to work on these programmes on their own, they are power and memory hungry apps.

[About2SwitchOvr]

I had a similar problem with iPhoto on my G5 where it became very sluggish. I managed to speed it up quite considerably by deleting the cache files that iPhoto creates. To do this go to the following folder in Finder: ~/Library/Caches/iPhotoCache then press Apple Key and A to select all the files and then drag them to the trash.

Don't worry; this won't have any detrimental effect on your iPhoto library and should improve performance assuming you are experiencing the same problem as I did.

Hope this helps :)

Are there any downsides in deleting this cache?
Also, what do you mean by closing the rolls? Is it an export of some sort?

Thanks!!