iPhoto slow - library size the cause?

I didn't think my iPhoto library was too large, but iPhoto will beachball when viewing the Photos section (where you can view all the photos by date).

I have a 15GB library with 16,000+ photos.

I collapsed all the years in this view....but when I click to expand a year, iPhoto beachballs and takes a while to load.

This is on a Mac Pro (see sig).

Viewing through events seems fine.

Is this generally too large a library for iPhoto to handle? Do I need to look at iPhoto Library manager or something?

-Kevin

xUKHCx said:

It might be a large library I have no experience with a library that large.

You can try rebuilding you iPhoto library to see if that helps, hold down cmd+opt when you start iPhoto.

You can create multiple libraries by holding down option when loading iPhoto, so you could separate out the older items.

Click to expand...

Thanks, my next step is maybe creating multiple libraries. I'll give the Option while starting a try.

I already rebuilt everything with no change.

As a note to Time Machine users, I think when you rebuild the library, TM will back up the whole thing again. Just an FYI.

Anyone have experiences with libraries that large?

-Kevin

So I made another library and moved a little over 5,000 pics to it.

Again, the view in Photos was sluggish. I'm finding it to be more sluggish when the events are collapsed.

Using it in Events view works fine.

-Kevin

fridgeymonster3 said:

it must be the number of files not size because i have about 12 GB but only 3800 pics and no beach ball on my mac pro (sig)

Click to expand...

So, if you go into the Photos view.....iPhoto seems to make a collapsible section in this view for each Event you have. In my case, the 5000+ library has 5 events. I have no problems if all 5 of the sections are expanded and showing all the photos. It's only when I start to collapse the sections (especially the top section with has 4000+ photos in it) that the program start to slow down.

EDIT: I think it also has to do with the number of photos in each event. In my example above, the entire library has 5000+ photos, but 1 event holds 4,200 of those. Collapsing the smaller events doesn't have as much effect, but collapsing the large event slows things down.

It's to the point on the other library (the 16,000 photo one), where I have around 7 events, but in the Photo view, all the events are collapsed (closed). Clicking on anything in this view causes iPhoto to beachball for a few minutes, usually resulting in nothing happening. However, using the Events view, the program responds fine.

Wonder if it's a bug in the Photo view?

-Kevin

fridgeymonster3 said:

I haven't had a problem in the Photo view when collapsing; however, I only have 350 pics or so in each event so nothing anything near the 4000+ you have

Click to expand...

Yeah....on my big library, with 16,000+ photos, I separated them out so that each event has only around 1000 photos in it. Photo view still stinks.

Clearly iPhoto can't handle it....which is weird because the same library, in Event view, works fine.

I'm not even sure what the purpose of the Photos view is....do you? It seems to mimic the Events view.

-Kevin

Thought I'd resurrect this thread as I think I found a possible cause for the slowness.

I imported my 17GB+ 16,000+ photo library into iPhoto '08. However, I trashed my iPhoto prefs plist file.

After doing this, everything was snappy. So I thought...ok, why would that matter. It must be something to do with a setting that writes out to the prefs file.

So after going into the Photos view on the left, I went to the View menu and selected Keywords. Sure enough, iPhoto started crawling in the Photos view. I turned Keywords off and turned on Titles, same thing.

If I keep those options off....iPhoto in Photos view seems snappy. If I turn those options on, it seems to crawl and has to load the meta data?

I also tried this with a 5GB 2500+ photos library and have similar issues.

Also, I can reproduce this on both my Mac Pro and new MacBook.

Anyone else want to see if the same occurs for them?

-Kevin

mixel said:

Interesting! thanks for pointing me to this thread.

Replicable on my 1.8 Macbook and 1.8 G5 Dual PowerMac.. Turning off keywords and titles makes it go fast!

No excuse for that really, seems sloppy on apple's part. When the events are collapsed what are titles and keywords doing slowing it down when they're clearly not even displayed. :/ Scrolling down an open event has always been smooth for me.. Collapsed they're horrible. Makes the whole view pretty useless - which is a shame as I think it's the easiest way to manage photos between events.

Click to expand...

Agreed on the sloppiness. Not sure why those attributes would cause that, but I'm glad that someone else is understanding and able to replicate the problem.

By the way, what is your library size, total photos, and number of events?

-Kevin

mixel said:

73 Events
5,871 Photos
115 Movies13.7 GB..

hope that's useful.

Click to expand...

Nice to know. Thanks.

With all my photos....I only have 6 events right now. So, something is seriously messed up in iPhoto to cause the whole thing to slowdown by using any of those options.

Looks like it's time to dust off the dev login and submit a bug report to

-Kevin