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kmac · Jun 21, 2006, 05:57 PM

We have an imac ~2003, 800MHZ Power PC G4 512 MB of memory running OS X version 10.2.8

It's my wifes machine and she uses it primarily for email and digital photos.
Needless to say after 3 years both the email program and iphoto are full of stuff resulting in.....yes....THE SPINNING BEACH BALL OF DEATH!

Now this thing makes my old 486 seem fast.

Recommendations from so-called-experts have been upgrade the RAM and buy a newer version of OS X... probably good advice but this is a 3 year old machine so I'm reluctant to throw several hundred dollars into it just to speed up these two programs.
My question is this:
Can't we save the pictures that are in iphoto in a different file or folder and start with an empty program? Then do the same with "Mail"?
And if we do can we access them easily?

Help would be appreciated - I don't know much about the file system or anything under the hood, I do all my work on a windows machine.

Thanks,
K

Dr. DDS · Jun 21, 2006, 07:07 PM

How much empty space you have in your HD?
You may consider using an external HD to store your Iphoto library.... I really don't know if it would improve performance but i found that some external HD can be faster than some internals...
As about the RAM, i think that if you go for OS X it could help. I'm ordering more 512Mb to my ibook.

icruise · Jun 22, 2006, 12:21 AM

More RAM would certainly help, but if you're getting very close to having a full hard disk, that could be causing problems as well. And you might want to consider just reinstalling the OS (use the "archive and install" option to keep your users and so forth).

tooki · Jun 22, 2006, 12:01 PM

512MB of RAM is way, way, way too little to be doing anything with photo browsing. (In fact, I recommend 1GB as the absolute minimum for using Mac OS X.) Also, the newer versions of iPhoto handle larger libraries far better.

More RAM won't cost you that much, and your only regret will be not getting it years ago!!

tooki

brokenbells · Jun 22, 2006, 01:06 PM

iPhoto seems to hog a lot of memory wen compared to other photo organisers.....

It is the slowest running program of my machine......my fault being an immensly huge photo collection

Dr. DDS · Jun 22, 2006, 05:15 PM

Originally Posted by brokenbells

iPhoto seems to hog a lot of memory wen compared to other photo organisers.....

It is the slowest running program of my machine......my fault being an immensly huge photo collection

Yes, that's why i don't store all my photos in iPhoto...

icruise · Jun 22, 2006, 06:36 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

512MB of RAM is way, way, way too little to be doing anything with photo browsing. (In fact, I recommend 1GB as the absolute minimum for using Mac OS X.) Also, the newer versions of iPhoto handle larger libraries far better.

I'm certainly not arguing against getting more RAM, but he's running OS X 10.2.8 which isn't as RAM hungry as Tiger IIRC, and I've used computers with 512MB or even less to browse photos. It's not the optimal experience, but is it "way, way, way too little to be doing anything with photo browsing"? Uh, no. The original poster also implied that his computer has gotten slower over time, so I don't necessarily think that lack of RAM is the whole story here.

tooki · Jun 22, 2006, 07:24 PM

Um, I don't think that OS X's RAM requirements have risen all that much over time. It's been RAM-hungry from the beginning.

As for photo browsing: um, yeah, uh, where do you think all the thumbnails are stored when they're being shown on-screen? That's right, in RAM. The more photos in the library, the more RAM it will need. I do not consider 512MB to be enough to do office tasks, never mind browsing large libraries of photos.

I agree that that is likely not the only thing going on, but reducing reliance on swapping will likely cause a very noticeable bump in speed.

tooki

icruise · Jun 22, 2006, 07:45 PM

Oh come on. My sister's and wife's iBooks both have 384MB of RAM and somehow they manage to use iPhoto. My Pismo only has 512MB and yes... I'm able to browse photos in iPhoto. Sure, my Intel Mac with 2GB of RAM is better, but you're just flat out wrong to say that you can't browse photos with 512MB of RAM.

kmac · Jun 23, 2006, 12:04 AM

People,
I really appreciate your suggestions, and the healthy RAM debate....but no one actually answered my question!

I'm assuming that iphoto and mail use a lot of RAM so does anyone know if there's a way to keep the photos elsewhere and access them with iphoto or should I be using a different program.
Don't think the hard drive is even half full.
Thanks,
K

icruise · Jun 23, 2006, 12:19 AM

Well, the thing is that I don't think that your problem would be solved by changing the location of your iPhoto and Mail files at all. I don't think it really has anything to do with it. How many photos do you have in iPhoto?

brokenbells · Jun 23, 2006, 12:56 AM

does there exist any other good photo organiser that is not so system hungry?

kmac · Jun 23, 2006, 10:18 AM

We have 4779 photos.... 6 GB total

Also
Hard Drive: 55.89 GB
Available: 34.32 GB
Used 21.57 GB

Mail is using 794 MB

Dr. DDS · Jun 23, 2006, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by kmac

We have 4779 photos.... 6 GB total

Also
Hard Drive: 55.89 GB
Available: 34.32 GB
Used 21.57 GB

Mail is using 794 MB

I think it's not much photos and you have a good free HD space. Try upgrade your RAM

kmac · Jul 3, 2006, 10:12 AM

FYI:
Since this post I have been backing up photo albums on CD-r's.
When you pop in the CD it shows up as an iphoto icon on the desktop, then you can browse the albums in iphoto sames as if they were in the program. This works well it frees up space in the program so it runs alot faster ....and they needed to be backed up anyway.

Now i'm down to 2800 photos....problem is now having trouble getting a burn to complete (any suggestions see my post from today).
thanks

gooser · Jul 4, 2006, 10:20 AM

try mike's thumbnailer. organizes and plays a good slideshow ---free too i think. can't edit though.

kmac · Aug 27, 2006, 05:03 PM

Hi folks,
I haven't looked at this post in a while.
Had a busy summer and lots of new photos!

In my last post i mentioned that backing up photos on CD-RW's works well and deleting photos from the program really speeds it up.
Problem is after I made about 4 disks iphoto decided it does not want to complete the burn!

What the !@#^&*should I do?

Thanks,
K

brokenbells · Aug 31, 2006, 02:02 PM

Maybe we should wait for Google's Picassa for the mac, which seemed to work very well with my low spec windows machine.....

And i loved it better than iPhoto...