iPhoto 11 Beach balls

[standingquiet]

Hey Guy,

I have a Late 2011 Macbook Pro 13, i7 2.8ghz, 8gb RAM, 750gb HDD and iPhoto is really laggy and when i scroll or change to a new album the beach ball appears and have to wait a 5-10secs for it to respond.

I have just upgraded to 8gb RAM from 4gb and it has made it slightly better but with such a powerful machine it seems odd to behave like this.

I done a fresh ML OSX install last week and everything else seems to run fine except iPhoto 11 (V.9.3.2)

I have 16,905 Photos which takes 82gb of my HDD of which i have 550gb Free Space of my 750gb.

Any advice would be great

Thanks

Matt

 

[chriscl]

That is a very large photo library; I'm not surprised to see iPhoto struggling a bit with it to be honest.

For a library of that size, you maybe need to be looking at a more robust Photo Editing Application - Lightroom, Apple's own Aperture, or Photoshop (either the full version, or the version of Elements that ships with the Organizer) are much better in that respect.

I have over 11,000 photos (around 65GB in size) and use Photoshop Elements Organizer currently to manage these, which works well, with no beachballs (mid-2012 MBP here).

I am considering looking at Lightroom though, as my library gets bigger...

 

[Mike in Kansas]

That library size shouldn't be a problem at all. I have an Aperture library with almost 48,000 images which is 440GB in size - when I open it in iPhoto 11 it gives me no trouble at all. When I quickly scroll through all of the Events, the key photo is a little pixelated at first, but it quickly snaps into focus. iPhoto is only loading the thumbnails when you launch it - it's not like it's loading all of the images.

I'm running this on a 2008 iMac with a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo with 6GB of 800MHz RAM. Your machine has better specs than mine. It's not a hardware issue.

I'd suggest repairing your iPhoto database to see if that helps. First, make a copy of your database and store it somewhere (either on another part of your HDD, or an external hard drive). Then, hold down "Option-Command" when launching iPhoto - keep holding until a launch screen appears with a bunch of options. I'd try "Repair Permissions" first, then "Repair Database", and if that doesn't do it try "Rebuild Database". This last one may take quite a bit of time.

 

[slimbek]

I've been finding mine to run slowly while it catches up PhotoStream images.
The syncing really slows it down... so I often just leave it for a little while so it can sort itself out (syncing/face tagging/mapping etc.) and then come back and it's normally all good.