iPhoto beef

[cfleck]

So is anyone else grossly disappointed with iPhoto5? I am. I have roughly 1700 photos that I had been using iPhoto4 to manage. It was slow and painful, but much better than the previous version. So for some dumb reason I expected v5 to be faster still. Wrongo.

After going through just 3 or 4 albums it starts to grind. The interesting thing is, it is all disk activity. For some reason it is fine with the first couple of albums but then it seems to max out the ram it will allocate at about 1/2 a gig and starts swapping or something. There is plenty of ram to spare so I'm a bit pissed about this. I may be wrong here, so someone tell me if you have other theories.

Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone has found a decent alternative to iPhoto. It doesn't have to be as featured. All I want is some way to organize them easily. I don't use it to edit or order prints.

 

[cfleck]

ok, i take it back about it stopping at 1/2 a gig of mem. for whatever reason menumeters was telling me that there was over a gig to spare, but activity monitor tell me otherwise. it seems that iphoto does attempt to load every picture in your album into memory until it has to start swapping. go figure. maybe my beef is just the way it has to be, but i'd still like to explore alternatives.

 

[brianleahy]

I just got mine yesterday too, and noticed lots of disk thrashing. I'm wondering if perhaps its rendering new thumbnails in the background... perhaps once it's caught up on that things will speed up. I hope.

My machine is a dual G5 - hardly a slowpoke. iPhoto 5 even took a long time to Quit.

 

[cfleck]

i just discovered something interesting. focus on the little image scaler do-hickey on the bottom right corner. if you have that on "tiny" iPhoto is as quick as can be. no thrashing and it never breaks past 250Mb. moving that scaler up to the other end though causes all sorts of problems. thats when it starts eating memory like crazy and eventually starts thrashing. just an fyi.

i hear your pain about the fast machine. i've got the dual 2. thats why it is so frustrating i think.

 

[owaters]

Apple shouldn't have even released this version of iPhoto. It feels like a BETA!
They need to get an update out quick! There are so many problems I have read about and experienced. Just take a look at the Apple discussion forums for a list of them. It's an official nightmare release. I just hope Apple can get an update turned around quick.

 

[gdekadt]

This and at least one other serious issue (FW problem as noted around these parts by perfesor bob) and I've just cancelled my order! What a pisser - I was really looking forward to those nested folders, double sided books and improved speed! So much for "completely rearchitected to deliver innovative new features and improve performance". Oops.

Alternatives to iPhoto are QPict and iView Media - both been around for years but I'll stick with iPhoto4 and the fully featured but bug-ridden Extensis Portfolio.

 

[aicul]

I've tested the Extensis Portfolio software. I claims to manage any document, I focused of image, film and sound media.

On paper it sounds good but if you test it seriously (I loaded over 3000 items of media). Some features break down, don't work or are bugged. Asked for advice from Extensis and am still waiting for reply.

My personal opinion is the Portfolio was ported for the PC/Windows world and retains a number of windows quirks. If not, they did a bad job at the user interface.