slooooooowwww iPhoto is driving me nuts

[dobbin]

I have read loads of threads about iPhoto being slow, both here on MR and also on the Apple support discussion boards. Sorry for starting another but I know this problem is really annoying to a lot of people.

I'm using an iBook 1.2GHz with 768Mb RAM and a 60Gb hard disk. I have about 15 Gb free on the disk. I'm using the most recent versions of Tiger and iPhoto 5.

I have about 6,000 photos in my iPhoto library and I wanted to add about another 2,000 after scanning a lot of old paper photos. These are currently stored in folders on my hard disk.

I have about 4,000 of the photos in my library organised into about 100 albums, one for each event.

Before I start to import the new photos, I did some simple organising of these albums in iPhoto. Basically I created a folder for each year (going back to 1992) and then moved all my albums into the relevant years. The folders fo 1992-2000 are still empty as these are for the scanned photos that I want to import.

I didn't delete any photos. I didn't add any photos. I didn't edit any photos. I didn't add any photos to albums. I certainly didn't do anything to the iPhoto library from the finder. I simply put my albums into folders to organise them into years.

Ever since I did that, iPhoto has been very very slow. I can't do anything without getting a spinning beachball for a minute or so. I have tried restarting my iBook, repairing the disk, fsck etc etc and nothing has helped.

It seems to me that iPhoto is not robust enough to be useable as a photo management tool. Its driving me nuts, because I really like iPhoto, but it just doesn't work reliably.

I am considering installing iPhoto Buddy and making each year a separate library. I'm sure this would help, but I don't want to do it unless I have to.

If I do use iPhoto Buddy, does that mean that I can't search by keyword (or use smart folders) across different libraries? That would be a major flaw to me.


Now that I have written all this, I feel a little better and less stressed with this. But iPhoto is still not useable for me.

 

[Applespider]

What kind of albums did you set up? And how many images did you set up in each of them? 100 seems quite a lot... so it may be what's slowing it down.

I've remember reading that using Smart Folders, rather than dragging images over, seems to work better and avoids slowing down iPhoto - no idea why tho since they're not actually transferred over into the albums. Then again, I only have about 10 albums so it might not help.

 

[dobbin]

What kind of albums did you set up? And how many images did you set up in each of them? 100 seems quite a lot... so it may be what's slowing it down.

I've remember reading that using Smart Folders, rather than dragging images over, seems to work better and avoids slowing down iPhoto - no idea why tho since they're not actually transferred over into the albums. Then again, I only have about 10 albums so it might not help.

each time I use my camera, I generally create a new album for that event. For example, on my birthday I took about 40 photos. When I got home, I imported them to my iPhoto library and then select the best 10 and put them in a folder called birthday. When I went to America on holiday I took about 600 photos and put the best 150 in a folder called America. And so on and so on. I have about 100 albums ranging from 5 photos to 200 photos. This all worked fine with no real performance issues.

Then I created a folder for each year and put the albums that I already had in these folders. Theres between 10 and 30 albums in each folder. It was when I created these folders that iPhoto slowed down, not when I imported the photos or made the albums.

Its so annoying, such a good program, but just doesn't work reliably.

 

[crap freakboy]

Try the iView-media demo.
Theres 2 versions the cheap and not-so-cheap. Basically theres nothing major between them IMO. I used iPhoto for a few years but got annoyed by its speed so looked elsewhere and found this.
Its soooo much faster than iPhoto it puts Apple to shame. With over 29,000 photograph's/avi's it never disappoints regarding speed and options. Granted its not free but in this case its such a vast improvement it makes it more than worth the small investment.

 

[dobbin]

Cheers for the suggesionl. I have seen the name already today and will check it out I think. I'm not against paying for a decent program - in fact I paid for iPhoto earlier this year. My main worry is that I really like how iPhoto works with .mac homepage so I'm loathe to ditch it completely. I'd rather fix iPhoto, but I will look into iView-media now and I will switch to it if I can't fix my iPhoto.
Thanks again.

 

[robbieduncan]

Some of the speed lag at startup is likely to be down to the slow spinning drive used in iBooks (and some PowerBooks). Short of changing the driver there is little you can do about that.

If you switch off the shadows on each photo (there is a preference for this) iPhoto is a bit faster.

If you don't need all your photos in a single Library you could split them. You can choose a Library/create a new one by holding down Alt when you start iPhoto.

 

[dobbin]

Well, as quickly as this problem appeared, it has disappeared!

iPhoto has been deadly slow for about 3 days but seemed to fix itself soon after I started this thread.

As far as I can tell, I didn't do anything to fix this. I was just sat here reading MR and then went to open iPhoto to actually time how long it took to open. And it opened really quite quickly!

I can't replicate the poor peformance no matter what I try (open lots of albums, turn on drop shadow, have thumbnails at biggest size etc).

Wierd. From what I've read though, its still unreliable for a lot of people and I really hope it gets a decent update soon.

 

[kasei]

Have you run into the problem of having your iPhotos crash and you have to go through the pain of rebuilding your thumbnails? This happens to me every 3 - 4 months. I have about 3,000 pictures in my iPhotos and I have gotten so I don't even setup smart folders because I will have to eventually create a new iPhoto Library.

I've lost some good photos and I have had to reload iPhotos on a number of occasions.

 

[dobbin]

Have you run into the problem of having your iPhotos crash and you have to go through the pain of rebuilding your thumbnails? This happens to me every 3 - 4 months. I have about 3,000 pictures in my iPhotos and I have gotten so I don't even setup smart folders because I will have to eventually create a new iPhoto Library.

I've lost some good photos and I have had to reload iPhotos on a number of occasions.

My iPhoto library once crashed and I had to rescue and reimport all my photos, but its been fine for a couple of years until this week. The number one most important thing is NEVER to do anything to anything inside the iPhoto library folder using the finder. NEVER EVER EVER. If you do, your iPhoto will almost certainly crash at some stage.

 

[kasei]

My iPhoto library once crashed and I had to rescue and reimport all my photos, but its been fine for a couple of years until this week. The number one most important thing is NEVER to do anything to anything inside the iPhoto library folder using the finder. NEVER EVER EVER. If you do, your iPhoto will almost certainly crash at some stage.

I've had the same thing happen to my iTunes. I lost everything! Thanksfully I had everything on my iPod.