[DannyVTim]

I was playing around with iPhoto and noticed when I imported 2000 photos, bring the library to a total of 7000, that iPhoto slowed down. I removed the photos and organized them into folders by topic and imported each folder one at a time. After I was done, iPhoto's speed was about the same as when I started.

So, I believe that if each roll is kept relativly small, it doesn't matter how large the library gets.

Can someone else who has a 5000 plus photo library try adding those photos in again at one time and than in groups of say 250 photos to see if iPhoto slows down?

So in short, if one has smaller rolls than does speed more or less stay about the same as the library increases?

Any feedback would be helpful.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

I have 9000 photos all in groups under 150 each and iPhoto is the slowest app on the planet on a Dual 1.25 G4.

[JKT]

The easiest way to speed up iPhoto is to ensure that you display the photos by Film Roll and collapse all and any that you aren't currently using. If you only display less than 100 photos at a time, it is plenty fast enough.

[xi_hyperon]

A speed-up tip I read earlier this year which does seem to help: In preferences, make sure you don't have drop shadows selected for display behind each photo.

[DannyVTim]

I know that closing that all the rolls speeds things quite a bit up as well as turning the borders off.

However, even with doing all those things, if one imports a large collection at once is surely slows down to a crawl. However, I also know it proforms the same with 200 photos as with 20,000, so it stands to reason that there is more to the picture.

I have about 7000 with another 8,000 to import and it is doing better now than when I had 2000 photos.

so, if anyone wants to spend a few minutes and try it out, it may help others. than again Apple will be updating and fixing the speed problem soon enough.

[KidRed]

So then iPhoto is the best slow free product, or the slowest best free product or the best free product that only slows down when people throws thousands upon thousands of large file sized images and expect a speed demon?

No speed complaints on my ordinary amount of 650 photos. Course, if I had 6000+ I'd expect a slow down similar to the way Photoshop slows to a crawl on large cymk files, or GoLive chokes on a large site or the way Word limps thru scrolling a large document, or the, hey wait, I see a pattern here...

[bmedina]

Whenever you make edits, iPhoto keeps the entire history of the photo in the library, all the way back to the original. If you reimport all your images, the history will be droppped. That's probably why you're seeing an increase in speed when you reimport.

[DannyVTim]

Originally posted by bmedina:
Whenever you make edits, iPhoto keeps the entire history of the photo in the library, all the way back to the original. If you reimport all your images, the history will be droppped. That's probably why you're seeing an increase in speed when you reimport.

iPhoto doesn't keep multiple versions of the photo. It has the original and the working image.

This was done without making any edits, so there was no versioning.