Updating Thumbnails... each time I open iPhoto

What I ended up doing is creating a new library with iPhoto and used iPhoto Library Manager to copy all of the events and albums from my problem library to the new one. I lost some Keepsake items like book, cards, calendars, etc. but got my library back with Events and albums and no thumbnail rebuild at each launch.

Toad-

I'm having the problem of getting the "Update Thumbnails" dialogs when I open iPhoto.

What do you suggest if clicking on the "Finish Later" button has no effect? This has happened a couple times. So far, it has eventually finished, but it has taken a couple hours to do so.

I'm afraid to kill iPhoto in the middle of this for fear of corrupting the library. It's backed up, but still....

iPhoto 11 running on a late 2011 MBP with Lion.

The Activity Monitor shows 2.4% CPU, 34 threads and 69.8 MB.

Library is modest (~500 pix?) and is on the startup drive.

Thanks in advance -- you have helped me many times.

-Tom in SoCal

With such a small library I would try what I did. Create a new empty library and use iPhoto Library Manager to copy all of the Events and albums to the new library. This will include all keywords, comments, titles and places. You will lose faces and any keepsakes, i.e. books, calendars, slideshows (but those can be rebuild).

Just some additional information:

Hendo got a small library but it takes a few hours to complete the Upating thumbnails but my huge library which got 210GB just take a few minutes to finish the updating. I think iPhoto is not trying to update the entire library thumbnails but only some of them. Is there any way I can check the log file what photos are being updated so that I can just delete and re-import those?

My system is a 2011 iMac Core i5.

I don't want to create a new empty library as Toad suggest as "Faces" is very important to me. I have invest many many hours to TAG those heads.

I'm having the same problem as the OP. It just started doing it a few weeks ago. My library is about 90GB and resides on an external HD. I moved it to another (newer) external HD and it's doing the same thing. Interestingly, the "Updating Thumbnails" message at startup only lasts 3-5 seconds which is very brief for the size of my Library so, as someone else pointed out, it's not actually updating the thumbs for the entire library.

This is still happening after the iPhoto update from yesterday (9.3.2), running on OS X 10.8.

What format is the external?

Both were formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

After updating to 9.3.2 but the problem is still there. Is it really a bug?

My Library is 212.35GB and it take about 1 minute to finish the update thumbnails now. Still got no solution to solve the problem yet.

I've try to search around the internet by google but I can only find this discussion relevant.... It looks like not many people are having our problem?

Adding one more person to the list of people who have this problem. Tried all the suggestions to no avail. Running 9.3.2 and Mountain Lion. Had this problem start with 9.3.

I am having the same problem. Very annoying!

I have the same problem, it's really very annoying, it started when i clean install 10.8.1 and iPhoto. Back on SL, there wasn't that problem. Any working solution?

FWIW it still does the update thing, but it only takes a few moments and isn't much of a bother. I'm not sure why it took so long initially.

Hope everybody else is as lucky!

What did you do to solve the problem? I still have the same problem even I have updated to 10.8.1.