Comments on: The One Apple App I Hate: iPhoto

By: Philip Djaferis

Philip Djaferis — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 09:18:00 +0000

I hate the manner it works and how it’s next to impossible to manage folders the way i want, photos always being duplicated where I least want them; total chaos…I worked OK with the older version but the latest is just rubbish.

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 22:01:00 +0000

What you describe is not what happens when most people use iPhoto so please let us know a little more details about your setup… How large is your photo library? How many pics are in it? Are most of your photos very high resolution? Are they in the slower huge-size RAW format? Have you run the latest Apple Software updates? Have you tried to rebuild your Library? Have you called the AppleCare folks and followed their suggestions?

By: Jen

Jen — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:32:00 +0000

Thats funny! I thought it was just me. Do you have a lot of photo’s? I do and I wonder if that has something to do with it. It drives me nuts though.

By: Mary

Mary — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:54:19 +0000

Update: As I suspected, It’s the sharing thing. I added pictures back to spotlight but kept iPhoto sharing off and still quick!

By: Mary

Mary — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:40:02 +0000

I feel your pain. Same thing here, for years my 40,000k library has been barely usable. Just tried two things and one of them actually worked. Not sure which but I’ve leaving well enough alone and keeping both of the new settings.

1st. In preferences/spotlight add your Pictures folder to the Privacy tab. It will disable searching for photos in spotlight. Not an issue for me because I don’t even name my photos and I still should be able to search within iPhoto.

2nd thing was, in iPhoto preferences I turned sharing off. I rarely use this feature but I can turn it back on if I need to. It will mean that you won’t have access to your photos on other computers, devices, or apple tv on your network. Just turn it back on temporarily if you want.

Something worked! I even opened and used, dare I say it, Faces which has always been so slow it was unusable.

Huge difference …. just try it! Good luck!

By: Kerry

Kerry — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:56:19 +0000

I have a MacBook Pro 13″ that I bought in February. iPhoto is the slowest program that I run on the machine. Scrolling through photos and importing is not terribly slow. However, when I click on a photo and then click the Edit option in the lower right, I can pretty much go wash my car, clean up, get a cup of coffee, and come back and wait a while before it is ready for me to actually edit the photo. It is horrendously slow.

By: XML

XML — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:40:21 +0000

Love your rant, there’s much truth to it.

I always felt like iPhoto was secretly programmed by a renegade group of apple coders that are on Microsofts payroll.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:47:10 +0000

In reply to PatrickJ.

I guess I’m just lucky. 22.47GB on disk (external) and it isn’t epically bad. I’m prone to rant about of a lot of things, but fortunately iPhoto isn’t one of them right now.

Lion on the other hand… garbage.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 05:13:59 +0000

If you are running iPhoto off a slow external drive or a network share then it is incredibly slow 🙁 It obviously does a lot of reading from small files (thumbnails) …

By: PatrickJ

PatrickJ — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:39:22 +0000

LIbrary is 11GB. Not stored on external drive, stored in standard location in /Pictures folder. Same was true on all the Macs I’ve had it on – except of course on older Macs library was smaller and performance was still epically bad.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:21:43 +0000

Just short of 3000 photos, stored on a 1TB external USB drive – 18 seconds to load. Scrolling photos, opening, editing is not exactly fast, but I wouldn’t call it crippled dog slow either. I’m sure from my SSD it would be a lot faster, but I don’t want to waste the space.

Just timed it – 3 seconds to close.

2.53 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo – 8 GB RAM.

You didn’t mention how many photos you’re working with in your library.

By: Jcs

Jcs — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:00:44 +0000

Damn iPad autocorrect. That’s supposed to be rainbow when’ll of death.

By: Jcs

Jcs — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:59:17 +0000

Back in the days of the first version of OS/X we called that the “rainbow wheel go death”. It was really common then.

By: kwame

kwame — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:23:30 +0000

Yeah iPhoto is slow even on a MacBook Pro. Other programs run way faster

By: RobT

RobT — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:59:14 +0000

Such a shame you have so many problems as it’s rather brilliant, I have an 09 macbook 2ghz and it runs great, i’ve only got about 50gb of photos but it certainly doesn’t seem to slow down over time.

One thing i’ve noticed is now the automatic faces recognition and photostream have put a lot more demand on the cpu when you open the app up.

Have you tried backing your photos up and started a new library file? just incase it’s some form of corrupt random album/file

By: jacoch

jacoch — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:27:21 +0000

I suppose it’s because I’m running it on an SSD (core i7 2.8), but iPhoto starts in less than 5s with my 22k photo library. About the same to quit. Far from perfect, but I can do with it. The only time I saw iPhoto as you describe, it’s when the library was saved on a shared drive.