iPhoto 5.0.1 (#10): More on large thumbnails causing slow-down

iPhoto 5.0.1 (#10): More on large thumbnails causing slow-down

Continuing our coverage of performance issues with iPhoto 5.0.1, we have received more reports confirming an earlier assertion that using large thumbnails may be the key to speed degradation in some cases.

Reader reports include:

  • "I have seen the dramatic slowdown in my systems as well. It appears to me that iPhoto is doing some "auto balancing" on the images. Most of my images are 4 - 5 Meg. I wonder if there is a scaling issue where auto balance has less info to work on with small thumbnails but starts to choke once the thumbnail gets too large. It also appears that the auto balance is applied to all photos in library/album as opposed to just those visible in the window.
  • "Yes! This is exactly my experience. On an iMac G5 20" 1.8 / 2 Gigs of RAM, if you make the iPhoto 5.01 thumbnails too big (how big is too big?) it slows down to a crawl. Very disappointing. I thought 5.01 would be better than iPhoto 4.0 which featured 'speed' as the main upgrade over 3.0. Picassa for Mac, anyone?"
  • "This was true in iPhoto 4.x ... Until recently I had the thumbnail size set to about 90% on the slider -- so they were only 3 across on a 17" powerbook screen. iPhoto would use over 75% of the processor for minutes after adding new photos, and at other seemingly random times as well. After reducing thumbnail size the problem went away."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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