iMac/ iPhoto Randomly Freezes often when cropping with iPhoto

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Level 1

4 points

iMac/ iPhoto Randomly Freezes often when cropping with iPhoto

The issue: when cropping photos with iPhoto the Mac freezes (not crash). The only recovery is to press and hold the power button. This never happened untilI updated to Mavericks and the 64 bit version of iPhoto.

Background: I have a late 2009 27 inch iMac, 8 GB of memory (iMac 10,1, 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo). I did have a 1 TB rotating HD. I now have a Fusion drive with a 240 SSD and the the original 1 TB HD. This problem started prior to and persisted after the drive change.

I have been working with Apple for months, I have sent crash logs, and other files requested. I even copied my my iPhoto Library onto a hard drive and gave it to Apple.

I have tried many suggestions:

1) Moved the library to an external drive

2) I have removed Picasa Plugins from Safari and iPhoto

3) I have formated my drive, performed a clean install of 10.9.2, and downloaded iPhoto directly from the App store.

The other bit of interesting info is that I can edit the library on another iMac (24", 9,1 2.66GHz, 8GB, Fusion Drive, 10.9.2, latest 64 bit iPhoto) and can not reproduce the issue. Apple can not reproduce it either, apparently on like hardware). Note that the 9,1 and 10,1 have different cards.

9,1=NVIDIA GeForce 9400, 10,1 = ATI Radeon HD 4670

Perhaps I have a hardware issue, but I did not have any issues prior to 10.9, and I don't notice any other issues with the iMac 10,1.

I am posting this in case, by chance someone else is experiencing this issue. I have spent many hours and $$ trying to eliminate the issue. I use the SSD now becuase it was very frustrating to wait for the machine to rebot everytime this happened. The SSD reduces the frustration of waiting for the machine to reboot.

Due to the SSD using the SATA channel that was once used for the superdive, I only have an external USB Hewlet Packard DVD drive. I have been unsuccessful at running AHT. If I hold down "D" while booting as dircted, the machine will not start off of the original OS X DVD that came with the machine. Holding down OPTION while booting does not seem to allow me to run the AHT either.

If I could pinpoint either a memory issue or GPU type of issue, I am not afraid to replace either myself.

Any susggestions would be apreciated.

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Mar 9, 2014 3:26 PM

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Answer 1

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 9, 2014 3:53 PM in response to teesalmon2

After somesearching, there are others that have this issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5637027?answerId=24334768022#24334768022

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Answer 2

oig3n

Level 1

0 points

Mar 10, 2014 1:03 AM in response to teesalmon2

Have you seen anything GPU-related in your system.log file (displayed by "Console").

Something like "GPU Debug Dump" and many numbers like 0x1234abcd...

(It seems the problem is related to ATI Radeon graphics driver).

I managed to reduce the frequency of freezes by performing system clean-up frequently - I'm running Onyx for Mac OS X 10.9, and it cleans different caches. Seems to allow me to work fine for some weeks before freezes come back.

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Answer 3

djwms

Level 1

0 points

Mar 31, 2014 6:23 PM in response to teesalmon2

I have the same late 2009 iMac 27" with the same configuration save for the 1TB HD instead of the SSD Fusion Drive. I use the latest Mavericks OS. After each reboot, I may get from 6-12 crops before it freezes. Interestingly my newest iMac 27" (early 2013) has never exhibited this issue. Admittedly I have a far more robust configuration, including an internal fusion drive and 32GB of ram, but there is no reason why my otherwise perfectly well functioning 2009 iMac shouldn't be able to reliably crop photos. How did you report your problem to Apple and have you found out anything further? Thanks.

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Answer 4

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Mar 31, 2014 6:57 PM in response to djwms

What version of iPhoto?

y to Back up your iPhoto library, Depress and hold the option (alt) and command keys and launch iPhoto - rebuild your iPhoto library

LN

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Answer 5

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 31, 2014 7:52 PM in response to oig3n

Nothing unusual I could spot in the system log file

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Answer 6

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 31, 2014 7:53 PM in response to LarryHN

I have rebuilt the library, this has not helped.

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Answer 7

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 31, 2014 7:57 PM in response to djwms

Apple has not contacted me for quite sometime. I have actually sent them my entire iPhoto Library. Since then, I have moved my library onto a Firewire 800 drive. I can use it for days on my 2009 24 inch iMac, but it froze almost immediatley on the 2009 27 inch:

"I have formated my drive, performed a clean install of 10.9.2, and downloaded iPhoto directly from the App store."

It has to be something about the hardware and drivers on the 27 inch 2009.

I am kind of upset that they can not figure this out.

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Answer 8

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Mar 31, 2014 8:00 PM in response to teesalmon2

@teesalmon2 - Sorry - that answer was not to you - it was to djwms who threadjacked your thread with a totally different problem - That is not going to solve your problem but it has a good chance to resolve the threadjacker's issue

LN

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Answer 9

Apr 11, 2014 4:38 PM in response to teesalmon2

I have the same freeze with cropping in iPhoto on my late 2009 27" iMac. I already recreated the iPhoto library, moved it to another HDD, but nothing helps. Now I see that there is really something about the iMac and iPhoto combo. Details:

2,66GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, ATI HD 4850 512, Mac OS X 10.9.2 and iPhoto 9.5.1.

Apple, please fix this bug... 😐

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Answer 10

tfxc

Level 1

0 points

Apr 26, 2014 11:05 AM in response to nagyattko

Same system, same problem, I have had it much more since I upgraded my camera to an Sony Alpha A7 (from a nex c3) much larger file sizes.

Wondering if more ram would help.

Has anyone tried that solution?

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Answer 11

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Apr 26, 2014 11:22 AM in response to tfxc

I have 8GB.

Apple actually let me know that they finally duplicated the issue and sent the information to another group. My current solution is to use my Early 2009 24 inch iMac, it will edit/crop photos ALL DAY without an issue. I moved my iPhoto Library to a FireWire 800 external.

This is a snippet from Apple's correspondence,

"....In our attempts to reproduce the issue, it appeared that returning to the browser before proceeding to the next image, (via the arrow keys), seemed to delay or prevent the issue. This might be something to try as a work-around for now....."

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Answer 12

tfxc

Level 1

0 points

Apr 26, 2014 11:37 AM in response to teesalmon2

this is my set up: 2,66GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, ATI HD 4850 512, Mac OS X 10.9.2 and iPhoto 9.5.1.

I just cropped a bunch of images shot with the next (7 meg jpgs or so) with no problems. the 15 meg jpgs from the Alpha are where the hangs are.

is that snippet the meat of the apple solution? do you have a link to that discussion?

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Answer 13

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Apr 26, 2014 12:08 PM in response to tfxc

I have no idea what the final solution will be, it would be great if it came down with 10.9.3. The snippet was from an e-mail Apple sent me. I briefly mentioned it at the top of this post, that I complained so much that Apple contacted me, which eventually led to me sending my entire iPhoto Library to them on an external drive. My guess is that there is something wrong with the drivers or some sort of cache issue with managing the ATI video cards: however, I could also be completely wrong. It seems that this happens only on a few Macs, and they have ATI video hardware.

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Answer 14

tfxc

Level 1

0 points

Apr 26, 2014 7:22 PM in response to teesalmon2

Just went down ot Micro Center andupgraded from 8 gigs to 16 gigs of ram, and no problem cropping the Alpha & images (15 megs).

So more ram for me solved the problem. I upgraded from a crop sensor camera to full sensor about the same time as the software upgrade, so dunno what caused the problem for me.

so the old can't be too rich, too thin, or have too much ram proved true.

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Answer 15

teesalmon2 Author

Level 1

4 points

Apr 27, 2014 9:06 AM in response to tfxc

I may try an 8 to 16GB upgrade, if it works for me I will report the results.

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