My wife and I have a fairly larger iPhoto library of around 280 gigs with multiple projects, books, etc. It runs very slow on iPhoto 11, especially when making new books, switching from pic to pic, and opening. It is a macbook pro 2.9Ghz Dual-Core i7 with 8 gigs of RAM. Will Aperture have better performance with this size of library than iPhoto?
Thanks!!
Aperture 3, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)
Gregory,
Aperture can deal easily with an Aperture library of that size. For the performance is not the the size of the library so important, the size of the image files matters more. How large are your images? Using very large scans or very large raw files will slow Aperture down a bit. A 60MB raw file may take a few seconds to process. Quite a few posters here have Aperture libraris of several TB, spread about sevearl external drive. Aperture has been designed with very large libraries in mind.
But iPhoto should not be so slow with your iPhoto library either.
There must be something wrong. Is your system drive too full? Or your iPhoto library on an external drive with a slow interface? Are your events very large?
Your iPhoto library may need repairing. I'd check, if iPhoto is faster, if you create a new iPhoto library and import a few images. If that works well, you will know, that your current library has a problem.
Regards
Léonie
Hello Léonie-
Thanks for the reply!!
They are not raw images, just jpegs. Most are a bit above or below 6mb. I have a Panasonic GF-1. I have repaired the iPhoto library before and it does not help.
The system drive has plenty of space on it...I'm not at it now, but I would say at least 350 gig.
Our events are split up by year, so they range from 3000 to 6000 photos. Does event size play a part in
performance?
Does event size play a part in
performance?
It does. At least, if you have smart albums in combnation with the events. I never allow my events to become larger than a few hundred photos. I have folders for each year, and inside events for each occasion or day. That makes scrolling and updating of smart albums faster, at least in my case.
I have repaired the iPhoto library before and it does not help.
Have you tried to rebuild it? if you try, make sure your backup is current, before you do that.
Sometimes a single corrupted image or a video that cannot be processed will slow iPhoto down. Do you remember, when the problem started or which photos you imported at the time? Then I would check, if these photos are o.k.
If the problem persists, ask in the iPhoto forum.
Aperture Performance vs iPhoto
