Is iPhoto 5 now ready for prime time?

[madmaxmedia]

I have about 16 GB of photos, and of course add more every month. I don't know exactly how many photos that is, but its obviously in the thousands (maybe around 10,000). I'm not a pro, but just shoot a lot of pictures.

Can iPhoto effectively handle a collection that large? I am currently just storing photos and organizing into monthly folders. I don't do a ton of image editing (I have Photoshop for that), I just want something that is a robust catalog app.

I like some of the iPhoto frills (like Galerie which creates web albums from iPhoto collections, working with iMovie, etc.) and import some of my choice pics into iPhoto, but don't know if it will handle everything.

Thanks!

 

[spaceballl]

I've got 5 gigs of photos on a 1.2ghz 768mb iBook and iPhoto is dawg... It really is slow. Very slow to start. Once it is open it is not too bad but I imagine that since you have 3 times the amount of photos, it might be rough for you.

 

[munkle]

What computer and how much RAM you've got will be important issues.

My recommendation is to use an app like iPhoto Buddy to split up your iPhoto library into manageable chunks

(iPhoto 5 will let you create multiple libraries by holding down the option key when you start up iPhoto. I just happen to prefer iPhoto Buddy for the few extra options it gives you).

 

[caveman_uk]

I've got 5 gigs of photos on a 1.2ghz 768mb iBook and iPhoto is dawg... It really is slow. Very slow to start. Once it is open it is not too bad but I imagine that since you have 3 times the amount of photos, it might be rough for you.

I've got a similar amount of photos and although I never noticed the slow startup on a powermac I notice it on a powerbook so I guess it's down to loading all the thumbnails on a slower harddrive. Your ibook harddrive is slower than my powerbook drive so it would be worse for you. Once it's up and running it's OK.

It still starts quicker than photoshop CS and photoshop's not even loading any pictures!

 

[madmaxmedia]

Thanks all for the feedback-

I have a 1.33GHz eMac (overclocked) with a 7200 RPM HD and 1 GB of RAM.

I currently use ViewIt to looks at photos, and usually Photoshop if I need to do any editing. ViewIt is very fast and has a nice interface (if somewhat unconventional.) (www.hexcat.com) I'll typically select a bunch of images, then import those into iPhoto where I only keep the 'winners'. For a few hundred photos, iPhoto of course runs fine.

I would consider something like iPhoto Buddy, but then it seems like more trouble than it's worth. I mean I would like to switch over the all iLife apps, but not if it requires more manual handling than what I'm doing now.

Photoshop starts up slow (relatively speaking) on any computer I think. I mean it's great for when you need it, but seems like a poor choice for basic image viewing/ cataloguing/etc. Although once you have it open it's not too bad...

Thanks,
Steve

 

[munkle]

iPhoto Buddy really isn't that much of a hassle, plus it's a good way to archive and sort your photos.

Depends what works best for you

 

[madmaxmedia]

iPhoto Buddy really isn't that much of a hassle, plus it's a good way to archive and sort your photos.

Depends what works best for you

Agreed, I'm sure it's not too bad. The only thing is that my wife also uses our eMac, so the less steps the better. She actually mainly uses Photoshop.

I was hoping that iPhoto was finally up to snuff in working with reasonably large collections of photos.

Do you know what causes the slowdown? Is it mainly getting the custom-sized thumbnails up and running? The scalable thumbs are a neato feature, but seems somewhat extravagant in terms of good CPU utilization. I would be happy if this was a user-customizable setting, so you could stick to a standard thumb size, with better performance.

 

[javiercr]

iPhoto is a toy. The way it handles raw is a joke, it can't monitor folders, it insists in importing things and making duplicated etc etc.

 

[wwooden]

I have about 3000 photos in iPhoto on both my iMac G5 and my PB, and it runs perfect on both. Starts up in about 2 seconds and I don't notice any hesitation. I have heard several reasons why iPhoto can be sluggish. One is the size of the photos you are taking; If say you only take 5megapixel pictures, it is going to take iPhoto a long time to load and adjust those photos. I take most of my pictures at 1024*768 because I rarely look at them other then on my screen. I have also heard that the size of your Library.iPhoto file in your iPhoto library and cause slow start up times. My is about 7.7mb's, while I have heard some people's are several hundred mb's. I don't know of a way to fix this, maybe others will.

 

[SpaceMagic]

iPhoto is perfect for me. I have about 1.8gb of photos.