iPhoto is a piece of shit
Posted by ark, ,
This blog is mostly about the scripts that I write, I'm trying to give back... but I reserve the right to talk about other techy things every now and again and today is one of those days...

I've spent the best part of a day splitting my iPhoto library into 6 separate libraries. Why? Because if I don't, iPhoto is slower than mole-asses. How hard is it to display an image and let me give it a star rating and move onto the next image without locking up my machine for 10 seconds. How hard is it to select a bunch of images and give them a keyword. This isn't rocket science. Well since I've split up my libraries it doesn't look like it's going to be easy to update my iPod Photo with photos from all libraries
which is a shame. However this does seem to have solved my iPhoto performance
problems.

I had 15K photos from about 5 years, mostly all 1-2 Megapixels That was about 9Gigs of photos with another 6 Gigs used by the iPod Photo Cache.

Here's how to do it... Copy your iPhoto Library directory to a new directory e.g. "2005 Library" (if you're feeling fancy you can skip copying the iPod Photo Cache directory.
Open up iPhoto and hold down alt/option while it starts, you can now select your 2005 Library and open it. Use the calendar to select all images that are not in 2005 and erase them (I hold down option, cmd and delete) and then empty the trash (command, shift, delete), remove all unused/empty albums. kill iPhoto. Restart iPhoto, but this time hold down option AND command, select to rebuild everything. Let it run for 10 minutes.

Now if you're feeling fancy you can go into your 2005 Library in a Terminal and do a
find 19* 200[^5] | fgrep .
this will show you all the files that have periods and are in years you supposedly just erased. Hopefully there will only be a bunch of DS_Store directories. As long as there are no images in those directories replace fgrep with rm -rf in that above command line to clear them up.

Do this for each year, or whatever natural split would make sense for you. You can get fancy by copying the whole library only twice and then splitting the difference repeatedly to avoid the amount of file copying.

If only Picasa was available for OSX. I hear aperture is even more of a machine grinder.... and what's up with not letting me fix a wonky horizon in iPhoto?

And while I'm bitching, I'm still super pissed that Apple stole my smart playlist updating on my iPod, you see I mostly use my iPod to rate my music, I have a playlist with genre == whatever and my rating == nostars. Then I can listen to it, rate my songs and I know all songs on that playlist need rating, It's nice to see the number of songs on the playlist go down as I revisit it and rate more songs. Well they stole it from me, an iPod update took that functionality away and I had to reimage the entire iPod (60 gigs!) with an older firmware which I still had lying around (a miracle!) and now I miss the nicer menu navigation in the newer firmware. Bastards.

Apple Tech Note, SmartPlaylists.com rants. Believe me I've sent plenty of feedback to Apple on this one...

These two experiences are really making me wonder about my OSX fandom, I love love love the window manager in OSX (wish it had focus follows mouse, but love the transient window behavior). I love that almost everything can be keyboard shortcuts (even selecting different Firefox windows (command-tilde), and I really like the arrow keys on my powerbook and how you can page up/down with a modifier key (I really miss that when I use a windows laptop now). I love running X windows from my Linux box at work right here at home on my Mac and it's almost seamless. I love how built in everything is (address book/calendar) and I even got used to the command-C/V/X pasting. But when these applications break, or suck, I'm stuck with them and I need to get used to it, this lock-in really worries me. Not that windows would solve my iPod problems...

Comments

Darnell King
Nothing that Apple makes, software wise, is as intelligent as they make it seem in the commercials and when you are using their machines in the physical store. Even the ipod cases they make are a cheap sham that never seem to actually protect the devices. I wish they could focus on making great machines again instead of suing all the android manufacturers over who invented the rectangle. I feel your pain friend!
Ciccio
I concur, but isn't all computer-related technology basically a big letdown and a continuous source of frustration? Any software from Adobe to Iphoto has brought this no-tech Luddite nothing but grief...