Hi folks, Has anyone else experienced s-l-o-o-w operations of iPhoto? Software problem: The spinning beach ball appears and iPhoto freezes for anywhere between 20-30 seconds after splitting an event, naming an event, or editing a photo. After that everything is normal again until the next such operation. Photo count- 52,000+; iPhoto library size- 140Gb Hardware set up: unibody aluminum MacBook 2.4Gz with 4Gb RAM and a 500Gb 5400rpm HD. Problem seemed to start after I started to use Faces. Is that related? Is there any way to de-activate Faces? Hope someone can advise....
I guess the only solution to this is to use aperture 2.0. Went to a workshop for Aperture, and the apple guy said that aperture runs relatively faster than iPhoto when it comes to huge libraries. In your case, 140Gb is pretty huge for iPhoto to handle.
We have the same problem. My photo library size is about 90GB. It was my guess that the huge library "overburdens" the software. When I boot, the beachball appears and I get a warning that "iPhoto is not responding" (option+cpmmand+esc). The launching of iPhoto will take about 10 to 30 minutes! Once open, iPhoto hangs when "faces" is activated. Beachaball will appear for about 5 to 15 minutes and then finish what it is doing. Pretty much a hassle. What I did was to split the huge library into smaller ones by using iPhoto Library Manager (another option is iPhoto Buddy). With the smaller libraries--iPhoto is faster and more responsive now. Others may have other solutions.
I had the same problem, but my iPhoto Library was only around 45GB at the time. I solved it by using the "rebuild library" feature of iPhoto Library Manager. It preserved all my event names and Faces info. No problems now, iPhoto launches my 60GB iPhoto library in about 20 seconds, with only 2GB of RAM.
Thanks for all the inputs. One more thing I learned after browsing through the FAQs on Apple's iPhoto page, was to uncheck the option "Show item counts" in iPhoto Preferences, General tab. This alone seemed to speed up things nicely. When iPhoto gets sluggish again, I will probably rebuild my library as you guys suggest. Cheers...
@incrediblue Unchecking "show items" really helps. Related to this, I also found in apple discussion this solution: "Upgrade to the latest version - 8.1 If you have not make the following changes in the iPhoto preferences: 1 - Turn off item counts 2 - turn off all sharing options 3 - set web syncing to manual Quit iphoto and depress the option (alt) and command (Apple) keys and use the last option to recover unused space and compact the library". By pressing option+command while opening iphoto, several options for iphoto maintenance will be shown to you, one of them is rebuilding. No need for third party apps. I tried it. It works. (I still have my old "problematic" iPhoto library which I split into several libraries). That instruction solved it. The problem library is more responsive now.
Slightly OT, Is it safe to maintain such a large library? 140GB? I create a new library every year. That way, I don't overload iPhoto. And I also compartmentalize any problems. If it is safe, what is the largest library that iPhoto can handle?
Try placing the iPhoto library on a dedicated external drive with Firewire 400/800. Large libraries are OK as long as the computer can read them fast enough. If you are only storing them on an internal drive it will be relatively slow because it is competing for access with the OS.
