Is there an optimal size for an iPhoto Library?
Why is aperture better for large iPhoto libraries?
Over a good few years, with SLR becoming cheaper, surely everyone will have large libraries. I have a large library as i include the videos taken in the same album as i like to group them in one place. When SSD's are so cheap that they come standard 4TB drives for 100 bucks, i'm sure none of this will matter anymore at which time, the average iPhoto library will be 500GB
Why is everyone so keen to make iPhoto work? It's not a good piece of software is it?
I just bit the bullet and deleted iPhoto and its library.
Freed up 20GB of my little SSD.
Very happy.
iPhoto 09 is an awesome piece of software, the current version sucks.
Changing the subject...
... if you have 30K pictures, you should probably consider switching to Aperture or Lightroom. I have a similar sized library as yours (51K pictures with about 240 GB of data)... and I cannot even imagine how painful that would be in iPhoto.
Personally, I use Aperture because I like how it plugs into all of the Apple Apps painlessly. I know people who use Lightroom and like that as well.
/Jim
Can you provide an example of how Aperture plugs into all of Apple's apps painlessly?
If you decide to buy Aperture... or even if you just want to evaluate its potential... I strongly recommend getting Robert Boyers ebooks which are very inexpensive... and probably the single best few bucks to spend in learning about photo management. He uses both LR and Aperture, but he seems to like Aperture better. Even just searching his blog is eye opening.
I think it is http://photo.rwboyer.com/. I would recommend the organization and file management books to start.
/Jim
I have a mid-2011 3.4 27-in iMac hooked up to a Promise R6 where I store 847 GBs of photos and video. It is neither slow nor cumbersome to work with this array. After you reach a certain library size, it is your storage system which will limit your access speed. iPhoto 9.5.1 (the latest iteration of iPhoto) handles all my AVCHD files with aplomb. I also have Aperture, but like the original writer of this thread, my library is purely for personal use (family photos and videos).
My advice, get a Thunderbolt or RAID array to handle your photos and videos. Improved sensors will stretch the limits of optical lenses as well as the size of photo libraries. What are you going to do? Put old photos in static media like BD discs or thumb drives? Maybe. But if you are like me, you want to see that photo of yourself 10 years ago when you got married or the video of your first born in the hospital. And you have to hunt for that? I think not. At least not me.
I want all my photos and videos in front of me and available as soon as I touch its thumbnail. Not only that, as your library grows, do you really think you will be able to back it up? I cannot. As my library reaches terabyte size, I realized that the only safe and practical solution would be to set up a RAID 1+0 array where at least my data would be somewhat safe. I know, no solution is without fail and backups are essential. But at what cost? I could always get a second array to back up the first one, but that will have to wait until I have enough money. Hopefully inexpensive large arrays and fast storage will come soon and alleviate the storage bottle neck which we now face.
Your problem is not the software. It is your access time to the storage medium. Solve that, and it will not really matter how big your library really is.
Good luck.
847GB of photos eh?
I'd cry endlessly if I lost all of that info. Your children born, your wedding as you say... I wouldn't want to risk a day without it backed up. Don't worry about TB speed, buy a cheap usb 2.0 drive even to get that backed up. They sell for peanuts.
847GB of photos eh?
I'd cry endlessly if I lost all of that info. Your children born, your wedding as you say... I wouldn't want to risk a day without it backed up. Don't worry about TB speed, buy a cheap usb 2.0 drive even to get that backed up. They sell for peanuts.
Why is aperture better for large iPhoto libraries?
I'd like to see this question answered, as I'm not convinced that Aperture is actually faster than iPhoto. I fear that if the OP buys Aperture thinking it will run faster or something, he's going to be disappointed.
I had/have the same problem as the OP: A large iphoto library taking up lots of space and being somewhat sluggish to navigate and use.
I was also told that Aperture was the solution. So I got the free trial version and gave it a try. (this was back in Fall, 2011).
I found that Aperture, while certainly a nice app, didn't solve any of those problems. It was just as slow to navigate my photos in Aperture as it was in iPhoto.
I documented my findings (as an iPhoto user trying Aperture for 30 days) in this MR post.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1260189/
If longtime Aperture users know something I don't, I'd love to hear what I'm missing. But, as far as I can tell, upgrading to a higher-level photo management software is not going to resolve the OP's problem.
So what do I do? Well for me, I also tend to snap away and worry about the consequences later. (This is actually a good policy if you have kids. Only 1 out of 10 pics or so is a keeper since the darn things move around so much. So there is incentive to snap away. .. but you HAVE to remove the cruft later or your photo library will balloon.)
Before I even download the photos from my SLR or iPhone into iPhoto, I go through the photos on the camera itself and delete those pics I know I won't need to keep. Basically, I intend to keep only one photo of each subject attempt. (So if I snapped 10 photos of my two kids playing together on the floor one morning, my goal is to only keep the best one. 5 years in the future when I look back on these photos, I'm not going to really want to see 10 photos of the same thing from different angles. I'm just going to enjoy glancing at the 1 best photo of that brief memory, and move on.)
Culling on-the-device means most of the "non-keepers" never make it into iPhoto in the first place, which saves import time, storage, and hassle. (i.e.: once you import all your photos, including non-keepers, time machine will get a chance to back those up and waste some space on your backup drive as well.)
Other hardware/software solutions that might help:
1. ILM is definitely a useful piece of software, and if your library is "too large", just cap it at its current size and start a new library, using ILM to switch between them when necessary. I have a library for everything before my kids were born, and then a separate library for everything after my first child was born, for example.
2. More RAM. I experienced less lag in scrolling through a large library when I added RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB in my MBP.
3. New computer or SSD. That should improve performance.
I may still move to Aperture one day, especially if I end up scanning historical photos/negatives from my family's past. But I don't really have time for that now.
. ..
My library is 400GB... and on my SSD... it is "instantaneous". I have my library managed, so the entire thing is on the SSD. However, if I had referenced originals... it would be MUCH smaller in size, and approximate the same speed.
Appreciate the insight on Aperture's organizational capabilities.
I expect the "instantaneous" nature of your library is mostly due to you having it stored on an SSD. While Aperture does indeed have more organizational features, I am not convinced that it is "faster" than iPhoto on the same hardware. When I did the trial of Aperture for 30 days, it was no faster than iPhoto on my machine.
*shrug*
Bottom line is that Aperture gives you far greater organizational tools than iPhoto. It also does not create duplicates if you edit. Edits are non-destructive (I am not sure about iPhoto). Finally... iPhoto is just a clunky piece of software that works well for small libraries, but seems to be too limited as the library grows.
/Jim
To my understanding, iPhoto does not create duplicates when editing unless you use an external editor like Elements. In that case you can get a quickly expanding library. One of the reasons I switched from iPhoto to Aperture was to get additional editing capabilities and not have to work with outside apps. The additional organizational features was a bonus.
I have never used Aperture, but iPhoto does create a full sized duplicate for even the slightest edit of the original photo.
I just did a test. I grabbed an old photo and put it on the desktop and named it "testtwelve.jpg" then imported it to iPhoto. I then dragged the one from the desktop into the trash and emptied the trash. Then I did a search outside iPhoto and only one copy of the 1.6MB files exists in /iPhoto Library/Masters in a subfolder by today's date.
. . .
So I assume if I switch to Aperture, I would have to go back and swap all my edited photos to the original, unedited version, then reedit them in Aperture to achieve space saving on old photos. Can anybody that switched over comment on this aspect?
I stand corrected. I thought I had read that iPhoto didn't create copies but I looked back at a photo I edited in iPhoto in 2012. There were two copies, one in Masters and one in Previews. The previews copy was slightly smaller since the photo had been cropped. 9.5mb for the master and 6.7mb for the preview.
Checked some Aperture edits on both my old iPhoto library and an Aperture only library. The preview folder still has a copy of the image but it is significantly smaller than the original with only minor cropping. Originals are 5mb in size and the preview copies are less than 1mb.
It looks like the iPhoto previews are full sized but the Aperture previews are about 20% of the size of the masters.
It looks like Aperture will save you significant space on your edits.
Now deciding if I should wait for the rumored Aperture 4.
I decided last summer that it wasn't worth the wait. Even if they came out with a new version shortly afterwards, it was going to take me a few months to learn Aperture 3 and I could wait on a upgrade. I'm glad I went ahead and bought it then.