[tramahound]

I have a 450mhz G4 Cube with 640mb of ram and an 80gig Seagate Barracuda IV hdd in it. I have very close to 4000 pictures in my iPhoto library whose size is from 800-900kb in size. Opening iPhoto takes minutes. Browsing through the pictures via the arrow buttons is a lesson in patience. doing most anything with the pictures is slow to say the least. I offloaded about 1500 pictures onto a firewire drive and tried it out that way, but while it was a bit better, it wasn't great. I'd rather not have all my pictures on a separate drive because that would ruin the point of iPhoto for me basically. What I want to know is what's the problem?! Is it the IDE channel's speed that's acting as a bottleneck here? It's only 66mhz if I'm not mistaken. Is that something that would cause such a slowdown? Everything else is pretty much fine, but when it comes to iPhoto my system is a pig. This isn't something that would justify a G5 purchase or anything, but is there anything I could do to help this?
Thanks

[MindFad]

iPhoto is probably the problem. Complain to Apple, seriously. They fix these things. If ya nag 'em.

[roders]

Umm, it's not any one thing that's the bottle neck in your system, it's a combination of things, upgrade just one thing and something else will be the bottleneck, I'd suggest a CPU upgrade, using OSX's software RAID with your internal and external HD (OSX loves this), and maybe a bit more ram.
It's the size of your iPhoto library that's the Underlying prob, I think there are shareware utilities available that speed up large libraries in iPhoto (I think by making lot so smaller libraries) although Apple should just make it work properly in the first place.

[hodaddy]

iphoto uses an xml database to orgainize its contents. in libraries under 1000 to 2000 photos it manages ok. however, much above that and the app is constantly thrashing thru the massive xml file.

this is the case on your cube and even dual 2ghz G5s....iPhoto just cant seem to traverse the large db file well at all.

i've been using iPhoto Library Manager for a while now with moderate success.

it does what it promises with 100% success. only problem is your photos are now scattered across libraries...makes tracking them down a bit more of a hassle.

[Macanoid]

I'm on a Cube as well, and if I need to just look at photo's, I use PhotoPresenter. Amazing little program that has the speed iPhoto should have.

[tramahound]

I'll give it a try, but I like iPhoto. It's a shame it just doesn't work as it should or I would like it to. I could use photoshop 7 too i guess with it's browse feature, but that app takes minutes to even open. worse than iphoto. ah, it's an old 450mhz G4 what can I expect?

[Macanoid]

PhotoPresenter works with iPhoto. It uses the iPhoto library and favourites folder, but all it does with that information is display the pictures. Nothing more nothing less. Quite handy really!

[Landos Mustache]

It is iPhoto, it can get just as slow on a Dual g5.