iPhoto 4 slowing on iMac G5

[Dave00]

After labelling and editing all my wedding pictures in Graphic Converter, I'm ready to load 'em into iPhoto 4.03 (version that came with my machine) and organize them on my new iMac G5 (1.8GHz, 512M RAM). My plan is to arrange them into a slide show with transitions and some video clips from the wedding, add a soundtrack and make a nice little present for my wife.

Boy have I been disappointed. When importing photos (which are already on the machine, in folders I previously designated), CPU usage goes to 100%, the whole thing slows down and occasionally stalls out. Worst part, it doesn't recognize around 20% of the .jpg photo files (says they're corrupt or of incorrect format), despite the fact that I can load them into any other photo software without difficulty. I've worked around this by saving as .TIF's, which iPhoto will now recognize.

Anytime I try to manipulate the photos (rearrange, change size, simple stuff) it seems to slow down to a crawl. This is odd because when I used the iMac's in the Apple Store iPhoto 4 seemed quite snappy. I tried repairing permissions and restarting - no help.

Any thoughts?

--Dave

 

[alex_ant]

I feel your pain

I use iPhoto 5 and one thing I found that greatly helped speed was to turn off live album counts in the preferences. In fact, I could not believe the effect this had. iPhoto must use a horribly inefficient algorithm to count how many photos are in smart albums. This doesn't make it fast, per se, just less agonizingly slow.

I don't know why it doesn't recognize some JPEGs, even when Finder and Preview do... that's just iPhoto for you, I'm sorry to say.

iPhoto thirsts for CPU. Give it one more MHz and it takes 100. It is one of the slowest, most bloated, horribly designed, CPU-guzzling, memory hogging applications I have ever used on any platform. Apple needs to scrap it and start over immediately. it just sucks, in so many ways. It's at 5.0 now and it's barely improved over 1.0. It's taken 3 years just to make it usable... sorry, I'm ranting about iphoto again