iPhoto = Spinner beach ball of death

In The Same Boat...

Ado, Yeah I've also got the same problem on my iMac at home. You open iPhoto and the beach ball pops up as soon as you click on anything and then you can't do ouwt for 10 mins or so inside of iPhoto, the rest of OS X is fine you can open finder, browse Firefox etc.
I've got around 4000 photos in my library and thought it was that that was holding everything up but even when I created another empty library on my account the beach ball was still spinning around for a library with no photos in it.

I did ring Apple up ages ago because I've had this problem for months and they said if you hold down ALT + CMD and open iPhoto you can rebuild all of it's index's and thumnails. So I did that but it didn't fix the problem.

So just as a test as an idea, I made a new standard account. Copied my 4000 photo library into "/Users/Shared" changed it's permissions so the new account could read/write. I'm going to go into the new account and hold down ALT so when iPhoto opens you can choose what library to load up.

I'm working on this problem right now so will reply with what happens, but I think the problem is account related somehow?

Same problem here.

I am trying the rebuild thing as I write this. This just started today but on my wife's iMac as well as mine. I have around 27000 photos so this is going to take awhile. Hope it works. This is the first time she or I have encountered this. I haven't updated yet to 10.5.4 yet (still on 10.5.3). Do you think this could possibly be a virus? Very strange.

When things like this happen, it could be one of a couple of things. The first thing to try to do is clear your caches in the:

Users/Home(Your Name)/Library/Caches

Send it to the trash, then empty it.

Second would be to trash your iPhoto preference file.

Users/Home(Your Name)/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iphoto.plist

Then, try to re-build you library by pressing ALT+CMD as you are launching iPhoto. Rebuild everything.

If that does not work then do this:

See the Manual rebuild section

Hope that helps

Same Issue

I have the same issues, however...
I have followed all steps to clear caches, rebuild, then manually rebuild...
I created a new library and yet it still has a spinning ball for the first 4 or 5 minutes with NO PHOTOS. It does this across all accounts! Help!

MacAficionado said:

When things like this happen, it could be one of a couple of things. The first thing to try to do is clear your caches in the:

Users/Home(Your Name)/Library/Caches

Send it to the trash, then empty it.

Second would be to trash your iPhoto preference file.

Users/Home(Your Name)/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iphoto.plist

Then, try to re-build you library by pressing ALT+CMD as you are launching iPhoto. Rebuild everything.

If that does not work then do this:

See the Manual rebuild section

Hope that helps

Click to expand...

Hey thanks for that man!
It fixed the problem right through! Cleared the caches and did a rebuild and now iPhoto pops up straight away. I'm used to opening iPhoto and walking away for 10 minutes while it loads... I can now import photos straight away... wow lol

Thanks again anyway

Just an observation that might help others ... I too was seeing the spinning ball when opening iPhoto. I unchecked "Look for shared photos" under the Sharing tab of the iPhoto preferences and then quit and relaunched iPhoto. No more spinning ball. Deleting the iPhoto preferences will probably also reset that option so it may be why that worked for some.