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Level 1

20 points

iPhoto '11 so slow!!!

iPhoto '11 is so slow that it has become useless. I've not even been able to try out any new features because iPhoto is too busy detecting faces, downloading facebook and flickr albums, spinning the beach ball, and not really sure what else it is doing, but for sure it is not letting me view my photos or do anything with them. I've had to force quit numerous times, and it's crashed a few times by itself. I really hope the programmers will concentrate on stability and performance in an update, or offer some guidelines on how many photos iPhoto can handle easily. Granted I have a large library but with the availability of 32GB SD cards, I am sure many people are going to start having to manage large libraries. Wondering if others with large libraries are having the same slowdown issues with iPhoto '11. Any known workarounds?

Posted on Oct 27, 2010 9:49 AM

24 replies

Feb 3, 2011 12:54 PM in response to Rei

I was having the same problems on my white iMac 24": spinning wheels, freeze-ups, slow-scrolling, the works. I was about to switch to Aperture and read some of the reviews at the App Store. One guy described how he was having problems importing his iPhoto Library into Aperture and a Genius Bar employee suggested turning off Faces. It worked for him, so I tried it on iPhoto and it works much, much better. All I did was delete all the Faces off the corkboard.

Feb 3, 2011 7:43 PM in response to Rei

I agree. iPhoto 11 is really causing me work flow problems at work...going from editing a photo back to the view all events, or any other such activity, sends my computer into a suspended state, sometimes taking 2-3 minutes to unfreeze. Please, Apple, fix this...

Feb 24, 2011 1:39 PM in response to Rocky Rakoon

I am also back to iLife '09. Tried iPhoto '11 twice but it is so slow that it is not even a joy to use compared to '09. When I added more memory in my Macbook I was hoping for a small improvement but not so.

One of the big performance hits comes from the fact that iPhoto '11 no longer scales photos while you scroll through an album/event. This is not the case with iPhoto '09.

Today i went down to the local Apple reseller and tried iPhoto '11 on all their macs - iMac, Macbook Air, Macbook Pros (13", 15") - and they were all slow to different degrees when viewing and scrolling through a 100+ album/event. iMac ran iPhoto '11 almost fluid but not completely.

I am considering trying with a completely new library instead of the current one which is converted from iPhoto '09. I already tried reparing my library etc.

rimi

Level 1

0 points

Mar 14, 2011 7:04 PM in response to MikeyF74

Even on my iMac (last gen) with a super I5 processor and 12GB RAM I can barely use iPhoto. Good for tiny libraries with just JPEGs. As the library grows it becomes barely useful!

Mar 21, 2011 10:24 AM in response to rimi

Slow as anything on every Mac I own apart from the MBA2

May 24, 2011 5:45 AM in response to Rei

I have had the same issues with iPhoto 11 being dog slow but I just upgraded to iPhoto 11 9.1.3 and its back to the speed I used to have with iPhoto 9 Hooray!!

Jun 23, 2012 4:36 AM in response to Rei

For me removing the Faces improved the speed of iPhoto 11. It became much more responsive.

JP Speed

Level 1

0 points

Jul 11, 2012 1:28 AM in response to Tommi Lyytikäinen

THIS HELPED A LOT! AT LEAST IT FINISHED WITH THE RAINBOW BALL.

topcop1

Level 1

28 points

Jul 11, 2012 2:41 AM in response to Yer_Man

Terrance....As with my other problem where my slideshows are skiping (sputtering) for a split second or a full second, I did what you recommended and created atemp library using the same pictures in two slideshows and creating the slideshows. The temp library slideshows worked fine.

So where do we go from here?

I too agree with the othesr that ""11" is slow and I too have had to force quit on numerous occassions. My pictures are valuable to me and although I am backed up, the way this program is running makes me frightened that I will lose something very important.

iPhoto '11 so slow!!!