iPhoto crashes on opening preferences

My next question is, "How do I use the legend: check mark for solved, star for helped?" I thought this was easy in the past, but can't figure it out now.

Richard:

Larry's referring to a possible MMe account in the iPHoto Accounts preference pane. It is often a leftover from the MMe days.

Abrasha:

Brilliant! We couldn't see the forest for the trees.

In iPhoto '09 there are no references to MobileMe in the Preferences.

Dunno how it is for everyone but for Lion and iPhoto '09 there is a MobileMe preferences icon in the System Preferences, and turning MM off there did the trick for me.

In the Web preference page in iPhoto 9 set check for new published photos to manually. Also uncheck the checkbox at the top of the pane.

Glad I saw this. Signing out of Mobile Me not only got my iPhoto prefs to work again but restored the Places mapping function. Thanks everybody!

Good detective work! I had the identical problem with iPhoto 09 hanging when I opened the preferences. I went into my system preferences (Mac OS Lion) and found I was signed in to Mobile Me. I signed out and it solved the problem immediately. Thank you!

Seems like I am stuck with pulling out the Ethernet cable if I want to change my iPhoto preferences.

I am on Mountain Lion and it has no references to MobileMe anywhere, so I can't sign out of it.

I think that if you have the latest version of iPhoto ('11), you can go into Preferences/Accounts. Here you then highlight MobileMe and hit the - (minus) sign at the bottom of the screen.

I may be wrong about this, since I do not have iPhoto '11, but I think I read this somewhere.

This is brilliant! Turning off wifi is absolutely the fastest, easiest, least headachy way around this problem of preferences hanging! I hope Apple fixes this issue soon!

I am running old iPhoto 7.1.5 on a late 2007 MBP and had been plagued by the Preferences freeze for months until I read this thread (of which there are many similar in nature). Turning off MobileMe did the trick. Thanks to all who contrinuted and worked this out. I assume somebody has reported it to Apple but I will try to do that now too.

Good eye. For me it was MobileMe causing the problem. Thanks again.

See discussions.apple.com/message/19368723#19368723.

You have to sign out of Moble me. In system preferences/internet/wireless/mobleme.

Even though moble me is gone it still is effecting iPhoto preferences.

OMG, I'm glad this problem is now solved. I thought it must be a problem with MobileMe because of the message in Console.app:

9. 10. 2012 09:37:29 iPhoto[818] POST /Info.woa/wa/XMLRPC/accountInfo (FAILED), httpStatusCode:-1, errorType:100 (domain=Error domain 4, code=-4), transactionState:5, txnId:0626DD7E-4A6F-4ED2-87FE-7697A310A0D6, auto-retries=2, manual-retries=0

After reading here I logged out from MobileMe and – tadaaa! – problem solved. Some hours later I encountered my .mac account in Mail.app had disappeared too. In Mail preferences I had to reativate the account and everything seems fine now.

Still have to get rid of MobileMe albums, but I know now what to do. Thank you!

Message was edited by: Ursula (typo)

Wow! This has been driving me nuts since I recently noticed it. Thanks for all who suggested disconnecting the network. Everytime I open iPhoto->Preferences with a network connected, I get a spinning beach ball. As soon as I turn off the network, the beach ball stops and I can change any preference I want.

Setting the iPhoto->Preferences->Web settings as Old Toad showed has not fixed the problem for me. iPhoto continues to search for MobileMe or something if the network is up. But at least disabling the network fixes it every time.

This is with iPhotot '09 [v8.1.2 (404)] and Mountain Lion 10. So I no longer have a MobileMe panel and cannot log out of that dead service. I guess I'll try pruning any MobileMe references in the iPhoto plist and see if that helps.