iPhoto crashes on opening preferences

Old Toad,

Made a new folder on my desktop and removed half of my preferences from my home preferences folder. They did not just copy but brought the actual preferences to that folder. Opened iPhoto and it did not crash when opening the iPhoto preferences. I closed iPhoto and brought back the preferences to my home preferences folder and checked the "Apply to All" and "Skip". When I reopened iPhoto I had access to the preferences without it crashing.

Thanks.

Perseverance pay off.

How do I give you points?

Really not necessary. Just glad to help solve a problem.

Somehow you need to mark/flag this as the correct answer. It just saved my butt, too. I've had the problem for over a month now, but just found this post today. I'm still finding some of the old prefs that I have to manually replace to get my system back the way it was, but iPhoto is working properly now. It would be great if this post was maked with the green "Correct Answer" so others could find it quicker!

Thanks!

Thanks Jerry but I cannot fine how to add that "Correct Answer" icon. Please help.

Thanks.

Maybe steelheadsurgeon needs to do it...

Old Toad posted a correct answer. Do you have the ability to mark it as correct?

pemuise wrote:

Old Toad,

Made a new folder on my desktop and removed half of my preferences from my home preferences folder. They did not just copy but brought the actual preferences to that folder. Opened iPhoto and it did not crash when opening the iPhoto preferences. I closed iPhoto and brought back the preferences to my home preferences folder and checked the "Apply to All" and "Skip". When I reopened iPhoto I had access to the preferences without it crashing.

Thanks.

I have the same issue, and I do not quite understand this post that seems to be the solution to the problem. Since I do not want to mess up my system I want to get this right. When you say "removed half of my preferences from my home preferences folder", I have two questions.

Is the preference folder you mention User/Home()/Library/ Preferences?

When you say "half", what exactly do you mean? I have over 800 items in that folder. These are files as well as folders. (The folders have names like ¿—†ï≈dtøˇ€ï“ @ï≈f–ï∆ and &O∞ï ÷Ùøˇ⁄‡ï,àÄï ŸPï tpøˇ€, and they are all empty)

Do I just randomly remove about half of the folders and files and move them to the new folder on the desktop, or do I need to include certain files, i.e. files that mention iPhoto in them, like com.apple.iPhoto.plist, com.apple.iPhoto.plist.lockfile as well as a few others.

Insgtead of deleting all of the preference files from his Preference folder pemuise only removed half of them and then tested iPhoto. When that seemed to fix the problem he replace those preference files that had not been reproduced in the folder.

As long as you have a copy of the Preference folder contents you can always get back to the original state by putting them all back in the Preferences folder replacing all file in there.

I thought I should add my little experience here. I thought I had the same problem with iPhoto seeming to hang ("application not responding") whenever I opened the preference pane. I removed more and more items from the Preferences folder, rebooted a countless number of times and Until I got completely frustrated and left my computer when iPhoto was not responding again with almost everything gone from the Preferences folder...

Low and behold when I came back an hour later, iPhoto was acting normally and I could move through the different items of Preference menu.

I tried it again on my computer and on another computer with the same problem and timed it to more or less 25 minutes before being able to use the preference menu...

So apparently with a lot of patience it works (luckily you normally don't need to change the preferences of iPhoto very often!

Wondering if anyone might be able to help me out a bit more with this issue.

I've tried everything suggested here, moved all preferences from my library, Iphoto still crashes on opening preferences. -Not sure if there's a solution for when that does NOT fix the crash.

I did as phil.c suggested and let Iphoto hang on the spinning wheel. Lo and behold, it did indeed stop spinning eventuall. But it still hangs EVERY time I open preferences, including th sharing menu which I'd like to ise a lot.

Any other ideas? (new user account Iphoto doesn't crash, fyi, so it's something in my account).

Post the first 50 lines of the crash report.

Old Toad wrote:

Post the first 50 lines of the crash report.

Technically it is not a crash. iPhoto just hangs. Whenever I open preferences I see the spinning beach ball. It never stops spinning. The only way to get out of it is Force Quit. However, here are the first 50 or so lines of the crash report.

Report Version: 9

Build Version: 8

Source Version: 4240000

User stack:

Sorry about that messy format. I couldn't get it to post any differently, i.e. not the way the report is formatted.