Just a quick warning to anyone thinking about using iPhoto09: if you have a lot of pictures, it is slow! I just came back from by girlfriend parents house where they have about 16,000 pictures (46gig). While iPhoto08 was fast and very responsive, the newer version is as quick slow as a slug given the same amount of pictures/albums.Â
Just to give some empirical numbers: switching from one section to the next (ex: from faces to an album) took about 3-4 seconds (mac pro 8gigs of ram). This might not seem a lot but when you are trying to put names on all faces, you switch from one album to the next quite often which result in spending most of your time waiting. Not very productive.
Where should we point the finger of blame? Most probably the face recognition feature. I wish there was a way to control how aggressive in its analysis we want it to be, or simply disable it when we are doing picture management.
It is clear to me that the newest iteration of iPhoto was made for casual shooter who have at most 2-3000 pictures. So, what should we expect from Aperture3? It is obvious that such a performance hit would not be tolerated by professionals so I am really curious to see what is going to happen. Maybe Apple will come up with a small update in a few days/week that will fix the issue, but until then I advice you to not use it if you deal with high volume.
Anyone is having the same issues? Or opposite results with the same amount of pictures?
I have a 75,000 photo library that I keep in my laptop (jpg versions only 1024×768) and iPhoto 08 handles them well (macbook pro 2.4 intel core 2 duo w/4 gigs of ram), I tried upgrading to iPhoto 09 and it was a nightmare. The problem is that it attempts to do the “face” thing on all of them and that is why it becomes so slow. I think that with enough time and if it ever finished processing it would really be fast but I am not willing to wait for a few weeks for it to finish. I stopped it and went back to my iphoto 08. Unless apple comes up with an option to turn “faces” off I will stick to 08.
Hi Adol, I am not sure the performance hit is only caused by the face recognition because I gave it a few hours to process a few hundred shots and it was still slow afterward. Not as slow as when it was doing the processing but still slower than iPhoto08 or Aperture.
When you gave it a few hours did it finish processing faces? I had similar experience with the new iMovie when it was introduced in iLife 08. My video library is around 4500 short clips, none longer than 1 minute and the version in my laptop (.mp4 320×240) all lived in iPhoto 06 at that time. When I upgraded to iLife08 and I tried to open iMovie 08 it attempted to process each video (it goes through all frames and imports them into its library) it simply crashed it could not do it. I ended up just not using iMovie. I have come to the conclusion that iLife products are great for my parents who have no more than a few hundred pictures and videos but by no means are they able to handle large libraries of either photos/videos. To this regard I have been very happy using the good old Finder and the quick view (space bar) option to browse my movies and photos and then I use other applications to edit or work with the files if I want to. I should clarify that I carry all my videos and photos in my laptop not to work with them but just to enjoy them and share them with family and friends that is why I carry compressed versions. If and when I do work with them I use the original files. By the way I have been shooting video and taking digital photos for about 6 years now and now with my 5D Mk II I have been extremely pleased to not have to carry to devices. For the kind of video I shoot this camera does more than I can wish for.
1) My rig is fast, I gave it enough time to process everything and it was still slow (but faster than when it just started processing).
2) I agree the iLife suite is for people who are not accumulating too much content. That is why I am curious to see the next iteration of Aperture to see if they or not integrate the face recognition and how it is handled…
Aperture 2.0 is faster than Aperture 1 (about 50% faster), the problem for me is that it doesn’t index video (it is not meant for it). I doubt they will include face recognition unless it is implemented as on-demand and not forced as it is in iphoto. Have you tried Picasa for the mac (the new native implementation), it truly works well; however I still prefer the finder.
I agree. Managing video is not a smooth process. I am not sure there is a fluid-elegant solution out there to do so now for amateurs. Right now, I simply create a folder on my content drive, and dump everything in it, watch each clip, rename it then import in FCP and start working. All the finished files are then sent to another directory and that is it… Works well so far since I dont have much videos but it will be an issue in a few months…