Why is iPhoto 11 so slow?

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Level 1

61 points

Why is iPhoto 11 so slow?

iPhoto 11 (9.1.5) is really slow and unresponsive...hanging up other programs, and generally behaving poorly. Anyone have any insight as to why it's so slow?

2 Ghz Intel Core Duo iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Aug 22, 2011 2:41 PM

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Answer 1

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Yer_Man

Level 10

162,396 points

Aug 22, 2011 11:40 PM in response to chrisnatale

I'll note that I have no such issues.

How much Ram do you have? How much free space on the Disk? What happens in Activity Monitor as you use iPhoto? What size is your Library - heck anything at all you can tell us that might allow us to work with?

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Answer 2

chrisnatale Author

Level 1

61 points

Aug 23, 2011 2:54 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks. 1 GB of RAM. 397 Gigs free space. Activity Monitor tells me that iPhoto is using 90MB real mem and 252 virtual. As for the library size, I'll note that there are four libraries in my Pictures folder...2007 iPhoto Library, 2008 iPhoto Library, iPhoto library and Rebuilt Library. Rebuilt is the most recent and sports 34.8 Gigs, iPhoto library is 24.6, 2008 is 1.42 GB and 2007 is 1.16 GB. Rebuilt is currently being used/accessed.

Any thoughts would be a great help.

Chris

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Answer 3

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,396 points

Aug 23, 2011 3:38 PM in response to chrisnatale

Get more Ram. 1 gig is the very bare minimum you need for the OS.

Regards

TD

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Answer 4

daveff

Level 1

5 points

Jan 28, 2012 5:29 AM in response to chrisnatale

I'm excatly the same, i have a imac 2.66 with 4gb of ram and 500gb of hd yet it does what you describe, why?

Any thoughts cause i'm really struggling with this.

Daveff

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Answer 5

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,396 points

Jan 28, 2012 11:07 AM in response to daveff

Performance issues can be caused by a variety of issues - jointly and separately.

How much free space on the HD?

How big is the Library?

As a Test:

Hold down the option (or alt) key and launch iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Create Library'

Import a few pics into this new, blank library. Is the Problem repeated there?

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Answer 6

chrisnatale Author

Level 1

61 points

Jan 28, 2012 12:26 PM in response to daveff

Daveff, I followed the suggestion to up my RAM amount from 1GB to 4GB and my problem disappeared. How many photos you have in there? I'd explore that option that Terence mentions. Thanks again for the RAM aadvice, Terence...

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