I have 2000+ photos. I’m using iPhoto 2.1, and it is very, very slow. I’ve tried a number of things to speed it up, with moderate success. But still, it crawls.
For a while I assumed that the newer version of iPhoto was much faster, because basically that’s what was claimed for it. I found out, though, that not everyone believes that, and that a few people report that it is even slower than iPhoto 2.1.
I don’t particularly want to spend $79, or whatever iLife costs, just for this one stupid upgrade. I wouldn’t use GarageBand, I already have iTunes, and iMovie and iDVD I’m not incredibly excited about.
So, is iPhoto 5 faster? Faster enough to be worth spending the money?
I think it depends on your hardware. By the accounts I’ve read, later versions of iPhoto are faster, though (a) it helps to have more current iron, and (b) it still chokes with large (6,000+ photos) libraries. You might want to consider third-party alternatives, such as iView.
My wild-ass guess is that iPhoto’s support for dynamic scaling of thumbnails and the ability to view your entire collection in one pop is what kills it.
(I’m still on iPhoto 2.1 myself, since I’m too cheap to upgrade my stuff until I actually get a computer that can run the rest of the iLife suite… )
I only recently started using iPhoto (didn’t have a digital camera), but I know that slowness was a big problem with it. I understand from users of earlier versions that the current version is quite a bit faster.
Well, putting an extra 512 MB in my Powerbook really gave iPhoto a shot in the arm. So I’d say extra memory might lead to a bigger speed improvement than a later version. Although the newer version does seem faster (I have 10K+ pictures and it’s actually browseable now.)
I also have a Powerbook with 512MB, and a collection of >3000 photos, and I have to say that the previous upgrade to iPhoto did make a noticeable difference in the browsing speed. The latest version, with the new iLife, has a lot of improvements that I like, particularly to importing from the camera and making slideshows. Plus there’s a full-screen slideshow mode where you can do the most common operations, like rotating pictures, assigning ratings, and deleting/categorizing.
So there is a definite benefit to upgrading. Whether it’s worth the cost of the whole suite, I dunno. I’d definitely recommend you look into third-party browsers; unfortunately, I haven’t heard of any to recommend. Also, a third-party one isn’t likely to be as well-integrated with everything else as iPhoto is.
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