iPhoto Performance

My next post tells about the issue I went through, and which is happening with lots of people out there, as I can judge from Google search results for "iPhoto performance". Yeah, that's it - at some point of time people realize that they have more pictures in their library than iPhoto can easily handle. I dug enough and I found some heplful advices addressing cure for this problem. Now I am much wiser and can share my experience with others.

So, let's begin. In our household, the main photo library lives on Mac Mini that we have in our living room. It has beautiful matching external HDD from Lacie (when I bought it, 250G seemed so large number. No, after almost two years, we are constanty searching for something to be deleted in order to have some space left) where we store photos, music and movies. iTunes is still rocking - it handles more or less finely about 80G of music, and I just see how it evolves with every version. Unfortunately enough, iPhoto is not automatically updated in the same way as iTunes, so I am forced to cope with iPhoto 06 version (unless I am ready to buy iLife '08 - and I think I could use that money wiser).

Note: iPhoto'06 is installed by default on all Tiger machines. Leopard comes with iPhoto'08 by default. So, this post is for Tiger users. Leopard users have more advanced iPhoto not only in terms of features, but also of internal structure, so the following recipe will not work for it anyway.

In 4 years we got about 20 thousands photos. Finally, iPhoto started to use all resources of machine when used. Computer started to swap frequently and become barely responsive for some times during the day. It clearly needed some action.
First very quick googling on subject suggested splitting a library into several parts and showed some software titles for helping with this. I downloaded some and started playing. Freeware or not, software was not able to pick up photos for moving to new libraries by any useful criteria except album-by-album. This one is great, but I wanted to split libraries by year. That was not possible. Selecting albums that belong to one year or another would be a tough task, and besides that, not every picture from the library ends up in some album.

So, I went a hard way of not using third-party library splitters. In the end, this way was not very much harder in terms of work to be done. If you have the same problems that I had, then read further, but before specify the criteria, by which you will split your library. Sticking to these criteria is the only thing that you really need. I selected year of making a photo to be the only criterium.

Before you split your library, I would recommend to back it up somewhere. DVDs will not suffice, so youd better copy iPhoto lirary to some external USB drive of reasonable capacity.

The process of splitting the iPhoto'06 library in two parts consists of the following steps:

1. Find out where is your iPhoto library located. This should be a folder for the library that holds all the information (photos, their midifications, tags, thumbnails, albums etc) inside. You will need to memorize where this folder is located (you will need it in futher steps. You also need to find a place for a new library (since you are splitting the old library, it means that you will just move some of information to a new library) - memorize or right it down for use on next steps. Locating iPhoto folder is easy - right-click on whatever photo in your library, and choose "Show File" from the menu. Finder window will open with the file selected. Now if you right-click the title bar of the finder window, you will see the full path of the image file, which will of course also include the iPhoto library folder itself. On this step, you might also want to do the backup of the old library as I suggested above.

2. Create new, empty library. You don't need any third party software for that - just hold the Alt key while starting iPhoto. This will not start loading the whoe library, but gives a simple dialog, that has allows either choose a different library, or create a new one. Choose "Create Library...". You will be asked where to put it. After you provide a name and path for new library, you will have a new folder where all library files will be stored. If you divide your library by year, just give a name like iPhoto2006. New empty library will be loaded and presented to you. That's ok. Now, close iPhoto.

3. Run iPhoto with holding Alt key again - this time press "Choose Library... " button and navigate to the folder you memorized during the step 1. You can see your old library - now take a look at the very top of the list of albums, where we have photos already sorted by year by iPhoto. In brackets after the year number, you can see how many photos you have from these years. If you are like me, you might have 2-5 thousands of photos per year. That's the amount of photos that iPhoto easily handles, and that's why it would be a great idea to have just one year per library. If you are a photomaniac, and have more than 10 thousands of photos in one year, I would still recommend to create a separate library for each year, and then divide them even further until the sizes of libraries will be ok for iPhoto to handle. Write down how many photos are for each year, and decide if you will put some years together. Close iPhoto.

4. Now you are ready to split the library in two parts. If you created a new library for photos of year 2006 during the step 2, you need to copy these copies to a new iPhoto library folder. For that, copy all files except Data, Modified and Originals folder to a new library's root folder. For these excluded folders, create their empty counterparts in new library's root folder, and then copy only 2006 subfolders from old library to a new one. Be sure you are not moving the files - if both old and new libraries locate on the same hard drive, then OSX will by default move files if you drag and drop them. Since you created a new library with iPhoto, there were already some files in new library's folder - it's ok to overwrite them.

5. Now you have all the photos for the year 2006 copied to a new place, as well as information about ALL photos of your old library. So now, we need to fix this mismatching. Run iPhoto with holding Alt key and choose the new library. It will open as if it would have all the photos from the old library, but instead of thumbnails, you will see empty boxes for each photo which is not made in 2006. And that's ok, because we copied all iPhoto files from the old library. Now return to the sidebar where you have information about distribution by years. If you click any folder except 2006, all you get is set of empty boxes. Mark all empty boxes with Cmd-A and press Delete. This will remove _references_ to photos that should lay at Data, Modified and Originals folders. After we remove these references, albums listed below will be updated with real number of photos. If you see that album is empty (zero in brackets after the name of the album), you can safely delete it, too. After you did this, you are done with making a new library

6. Now after new library is ready, you might clean up your old database from photos that were moved to a new library. Remove 2006 folder from Data, Originals and Modified folder for old iPhoto library and then clean library from the references in the same way as I described in 5.

7. Repeat steps 2, 4, 5 and 6 for all other years you want to fork to new libraries. You can even skip step 2 if you create a folder for new library manually. You can just create a library root folder in desired location, and proceed with copying files. When copying files, be sure that you take them from the library that knows everything about photos that will be moved to a new library.

That's it. I hope this instruction helped someone

No news is good news

Well, readers of this blog might be surprised with my long silence, or even dismissed the idea to read new posts.
Really, I have been out of reach for some months - but that's actually very good to explain my MacBook experience. It is became a really handy working computer, which allows me to do everything that I need in my daily work. I just use it so extensively that I don't have any time left to share this with outer world.
I think I have no anything new to add about my experience with hardware - it is still fast enough after so long time, it is still in good condition (I have just my keyboard a bit dirty and touchpad and some keys on keyboard too much polished with my fingers), it is still quiet (my PC-laptop started to be very noisy after month or so of usage). Windows is still working happily inside the virtual machine. Everything is just fine.
So, probably they won't be too much of hardware posts in the future. Come back to read my adventures in Mac's software world. :)