iPhoto 5.0.3 Released

[tmornini]

iPhoto 5 is still a huge memory hog. I had hopes that this fix might bring it back to as good as 4 or 3, but alas. Starting iPhoto takes 875MB of my 1GB of physical memory as well as another couple hundred MB of swap. When can we finally have an iPhoto Pro which can handle a medium size library? (About 7,000 photos in my case) Or at least a port of Picassa?

This is likely just Unix memory optimization. iPhoto must read the photos when it starts to display them, so Unix will just cache the data in RAM in case that file needs to be read again.

RAM is for using, right? When Unix uses the RAM like that, it will happily give it up to other programs that request it directly, so nothing is lost, except the delay of having to read those photos off disk next time.

I always hear about people talking about these huge memory requirements for OS X, but on my own 1GB Powerbook, I typically have 12 basic apps open (set to launch at startup: Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Preview, Terminal, BBEdit, Skype, and eFax) plus whatever specialized apps I need at the moment.

Recently one of my two memory modules failed, and I noticed some regular annoying delays, which eventually led to me finding the bad module. With the module replaced, there are never any delays.

I first ran into Unix in 1992. I was SHOCKED at how the system continually showed nearly all RAM in use. I was also shocked at how fast and smooth everything worked, particularly file caching. Opening the same thing twice was always faster the second time. Anyway, the more I learned, the more I appreciated the computer putting all it's resources to use. What good is memory if it's not used?

 

[Spinnetti]

Blissfull ignorance...

My pictures used to maintain their color, but they would get like 5% brighter... can anyone confirm that this is fixed as well?

I never noticed many of these issues BEFORE the update, but just noticed the 5% brighter thing... worst part is, was that right before or right after the update? I can't remember!

 

[jaina]

Rotate bug?

Hello!

Can anyone confirm a bug with the rotate option?

I rotate photos from a digital camera to be shown in the right way. But when editing them (by double-clicking) they show up upside down! Like the rotation was done in the opposite direction...

Greets,

Jaina

 

[cheekyspanky]

Still takes a good 3 bounces to open and a further 15 - 25 seconds for my photos to show up with the beach ball of doom spinning all that time!

Thats with 8200 photos (approx 3.5GB).

An improvement, but hopefully it'll still get a bit quicker with further updates

 

[decksnap]

Not being able to change file names I think I understand the reasoning behind and the weird date based folder system. I kinda figured that it was to do with avoiding newbies accidentally renaming images the same thing and then discovering that they'd lost half their images. Also, if you're using iPhoto for all your image needs , you don't need to see the underlying file names. And with Spotlight able to find the iPhoto title in other apps 'Open' dialogues, it's much less of an issue.

The lack of file renaming is still a huge stumbling block. I would love to be able to drag a photo out of iPhoto and have it be named what I renamed it in iPhoto, but since I can't rename it....

 

[DWKlink]

I never noticed many of these issues BEFORE the update, but just noticed the 5% brighter thing... worst part is, was that right before or right after the update? I can't remember!

This was an issue since 5.0 i believe when running iPhoto on Tiger. When you would edit a photo in any way, the brightness would jump just as it would save. When the save dialogue would disappear you would see the jump happen.

This problem has been fixed!!!

Unfortunately, as I finished restoring one of my originals of an old edited photo (that had succombed to this bug) and I left arrowed to go back to the previous photo I had my FIRST ever iPhoto crash...

Fix one thing, break another. Ain't that always the case! But overall I will say that it opens much faster. The speed is pretty impressive.

 

[aricher]

BAM - much faster, no more color problems - I am a happy man. Even though I use Portfolio for all of my images my wife is a huge iPhoto fan.

 

[alex_ant]

If iPhoto flash up the UI that fast... than apps like the Dictionary should also... maybe in 10.4.3? iPhoto is now even FASTER than any PC photo editor (it has always been faster).

What a joke. iPhoto is by far the slowest image browser ever and has NEVER been even REMOTELY fast compared to ANY of its competition. The only reason you're hearing about these 1-second launch times or whatever is because prebinding got updated after it got installed.

 

[alex_ant]

This is likely just Unix memory optimization. iPhoto must read the photos when it starts to display them, so Unix will just cache the data in RAM in case that file needs to be read again.

If this is the case then Unix memory "optimization" is stupid in this instance and needs to be changed because it doesn't work.

RAM is for using, right? When Unix uses the RAM like that, it will happily give it up to other programs that request it directly, so nothing is lost, except the delay of having to read those photos off disk next time.

And that delay is key. Yeah, it will happily page all swollen, bloated 800MB of iPhoto out to disk, taking probably at least a whole minute.

On the topic of being able to manage 50k photos without bringing a machine with 1GB RAM to its knees:
iView can do it;
ACDsee can do it;
Picasa can do it;
Why can't iPhoto?

I always hear about people talking about these huge memory requirements for OS X, but on my own 1GB Powerbook, I typically have 12 basic apps open (set to launch at startup: Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Preview, Terminal, BBEdit, Skype, and eFax) plus whatever specialized apps I need at the moment.

You obviously do not have 20k photos in iPhoto then, or you would be swapping like crazy.

I first ran into Unix in 1992. I was SHOCKED at how the system continually showed nearly all RAM in use. I was also shocked at how fast and smooth everything worked, particularly file caching. Opening the same thing twice was always faster the second time. Anyway, the more I learned, the more I appreciated the computer putting all it's resources to use. What good is memory if it's not used?

EVERY OS does file caching. Please spare the Unix bigotry. OS X is the most memory-hungry, bloated OS ever. Yes, it's a great OS but let's be honest - it uses massive, uwieldy amounts of RAM. And to answer your question re: what good is memory if it's not being used, well, if it's not being used, then that's more free space into which more data you open up can go. If it's all being used, then the next program you launch will cause something else to get swapped out, which will hurt performance. Free memory is a good thing. It's not like that whole gig of used memory sits there turbocharging your computer or something. It's all used up because your software is bloated as hell!

 

[friction3000]

alternatives to iPhoto?

it's great that they fixed that bug (though i can't believe it took that long) but i still hate iPhoto.

anybody know of good alternatives? mainly, i want to browse my photos and organize them in a simple, DIRECT way. yeah, i want them to live in a regular finder-style folder environment (not the way iPhoto does it), be able to rename them, et cetera.

i used to use the free fuji finepix editor software that came with my old camera, but i think it's os9 only. it couldn't retouch photos, but i could keep them organized how i liked, rotate, rename, and resize them with ease.

thanks in advance.....
frx

 

[alex_ant]

it's great that they fixed that bug (though i can't believe it took that long) but i still hate iPhoto.

anybody know of good alternatives? mainly, i want to browse my photos and organize them in a simple, DIRECT way. yeah, i want them to live in a regular finder-style folder environment (not the way iPhoto does it), be able to rename them, et cetera.

i used to use the free fuji finepix editor software that came with my old camera, but i think it's os9 only. it couldn't retouch photos, but i could keep them organized how i liked, rotate, rename, and resize them with ease.

thanks in advance.....
frx

iView Media Pro can do this, but it's expensive. Lightbox, Shoebox, ACDSee, and gBrowser (apparently abandoned) are some others I can think of. All of them have problems in some way or another - that's why iPhoto being sucky is so frustrating.

 

[cheekyspanky]

Maybe Google will one day release Picasa for Mac? That was such a good program on the PC, worked really nicely

 

[wdlove]

BAM - much faster, no more color problems - I am a happy man. Even though I use Portfolio for all of my images my wife is a huge iPhoto fan.

My wife is the one that is using Tiger on her 15" PowerBook. So hopefully this update will help her also.

 

[Lacero]

It appears they fixed the issue where you could drag your entire photo library icon onto the Finder desktop. That would cause a beachball for hours.

 

[MikeAtari]

Backup your library...

iPhoto 5 is still a huge memory hog. I had hopes that this fix might bring it back to as good as 4 or 3, but alas. Starting iPhoto takes 875MB of my 1GB of physical memory as well as another couple hundred MB of swap. When can we finally have an iPhoto Pro which can handle a medium size library? (About 7,000 photos in my case) Or at least a port of Picassa?

I start up IPhoto with 1255 photos.
It uses: 46Meg of Real and 309Meg of Virtual.

So, my guess is your VAST library and IPhoto probably caching your thumbnails to display instantly is using up that Real Memory.

 

[pdpardue]

still slow as molasses

I just upgraded, and though I can't really say anything about the color bug, I can say that it doesn't feel any faster then before.
Takes just as long to load 3522 pics as it did yesterday... still takes like a minute or more to quit. Still takes my system and brings it to a dead stop almost.

Then again, it's only a dual 1.8 G5 with 256MB of ram... really need to get more ram.

 

[Applespider]

iPhoto 5 is still a huge memory hog. I had hopes that this fix might bring it back to as good as 4 or 3, but alas. Starting iPhoto takes 875MB of my 1GB of physical memory as well as another couple hundred MB of swap. When can we finally have an iPhoto Pro which can handle a medium size library? (About 7,000 photos in my case) Or at least a port of Picassa?

I've got 8000 images in my iPhoto library and it usually takes up about 3-400 MB of physical memory.

After 5.0.3, it opened with a single bounce and showed the 'loading' circle for less than 5 seconds. I really couldn't quite believe it.

Having said that, I make sure that my iPhoto trash is empty (At one point I found 6000 images in there and it was really sluggish - I'd never appreciated that unlike the other iApps, when you delete something it doesn't go to your normal Trash) and I keep my pictures in rolls which are usually closed since I find it easier to find the pictures I want then. Strangely, using the black background for viewing also seems to speed things up (presumably because it doesn't have to draw the shadow for each thumbail)

 

[DAND]

it's great that they fixed that bug (though i can't believe it took that long) but i still hate iPhoto.

anybody know of good alternatives? mainly, i want to browse my photos and organize them in a simple, DIRECT way. yeah, i want them to live in a regular finder-style folder environment (not the way iPhoto does it), be able to rename them, et cetera.

i used to use the free fuji finepix editor software that came with my old camera, but i think it's os9 only. it couldn't retouch photos, but i could keep them organized how i liked, rotate, rename, and resize them with ease.

thanks in advance.....
frx

take a look at Kodak EasyShare. I have not tested it yet for large number of files, but I will soon. Has basic editing, and good organization (somewhat like picasa, but different)

 

[JDOG_]

Still takes a super long time to start up on my machine even with just over 2,000 photos. I emptied the trash and even set the background to black but it suffers incredible lag and hangs that put my whole system at pretty much an entire standstill.

Lame. iPhoto 4 was getting so responsive at points too...iPhoto 5 just seems like a step backwards.

 

[agentkow]

Hello!

Can anyone confirm a bug with the rotate option?

I rotate photos from a digital camera to be shown in the right way. But when editing them (by double-clicking) they show up upside down! Like the rotation was done in the opposite direction...

I can confirm the same bug, it happened in 5.0.2 for me just recently, and it still is happeneing to the same photos in 5.0.3, though I haven't tried it with new photos.

If you view them in the library they look fine, but in slideshow or edit mode they are sideways, but then if you flip them they are off in the library view, so whats up with that?

 

[jaina]

I can confirm the same bug, it happened in 5.0.2 for me just recently, and it still is happeneing to the same photos in 5.0.3, though I haven't tried it with new photos.

If you view them in the library they look fine, but in slideshow or edit mode they are sideways, but then if you flip them they are off in the library view, so whats up with that?

Hello!

I think you can get rid of the bug by reverting the pictures to their originals (even if not edited...). As I get not many new pictures now, I don't know if it happens for new ones too

Greets,

Jaina

 

[RedTomato]

I still cannot drag and drop photos from iPhoto into Apple Mail

Have to either drag and drop onto desktop, then drag into the compose window, or use the Export to Email button (which starts a whole new email )

I like iPhoto, but why can't I drag a photo into an email that I'm halfway through typing? I often send photos, and this is a very basic Apple feature I expect to work.

For heavens sake, I can drag a photo from iPhoto into a bloody MS WORD document and have everthing work as expected.

Seems Microsoft works with Apple's usablitiy guidelines on this issue better than Apple's own flagship email application.

Comments?

xoxo tomato

 

[terryb]

iPhoto has been constantly crashing on mine ever since installing 5.0.3. It seems to be related to either rotating images or deleting them, and may be down to trying to rotate then delete or delete then rotate or just rotate too many images too quickly... I'll rotate one, scan it and make sure I want it, rotate another, go onto another picture, then bam, crash. There's no consistent reason for it at all. VERY annoying, particularly as it doesn't save the session's information - so anything rotated or deleted before the crash is no longer rotated or deleted when you start up again.

I wish Picasa was available for the Mac...