iPhoto Management of 30k+ Photos

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Level 1

5 points

iPhoto Management of 30k+ Photos

I made the decision to move from Windows to Mac after many years as a PC user 🙂 I picked up a Mac Book Pro and Mac Mini Server just last week and am in the process of getting all my data moved over. My plan is to use the Mac Mini Server to store and host iTunes and iPhoto data. I added a total of 16Gb of Ram to my Mac Mini server which is a Intel Core i5 processor.

I have been adding all my photos to iPhoto which worked well early in the migration. Once I got to around 15k photos performance started to tank. Is there a way to optimize iPhoto to get the best performance as possible? or maybe some iPhoto best practices telling me I should or should't use iPhoto for this number of photos. In total I have about 600Gb of Music, Photos, and Movies on my Mac server. iTunes and other apps seem to run just fine. Its only iPhoto thats runs really slow.

Any help would be great!

Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Jul 6, 2013 4:02 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 6, 2013 6:05 PM in response to cgx4

Is there a way to optimize iPhoto to get the best performance as possible?

Yes. Don't store the library on a file server.

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Answer 2

cgx4 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jul 6, 2013 6:34 PM in response to Linc Davis

Why won't I store it on the server? Guess I could go to an external Thurnderbolt drive. Just not sure that would solve this problem. I guess my real question is where is the bottleneck? Disk I/O? would SSD drives and/or RAID 10 (more spindles) yield better performance?

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 6, 2013 7:39 PM in response to cgx4

An SSD will certainly perform better than a disk. Anything will perform better than a file server.

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Answer 4

Jul 7, 2013 3:03 AM in response to cgx4

FWIW, my thoughts on iPhoto is that it is a great app

for a casual user with family photos. My personal experience

found it quite lacking in a lot of respects.

For someone with a very large library as yourself, it is probably

not the app for you, especially if you are simply looking for a

management/viewer app. As to which one is best, I really

can't help you there, as I use Adobe Bridge which is part of

Photoshop CS6 (the last Adobe product I will buy now that they

have moved to the ball and chain software model).

Also, for photos, a hardware solution will not be near as

benificial as finding good software for your purpose. The

hardware solution would be like putting high performance

racing tires on a Yugo.

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