IPhoto 09 - BIG LIST OF BUGS I'VE FOUND

Question

I’ve been using IPhoto 08 for 10 months with no issues whatsoever.
Installed IPhoto 09 yesterday and have loads of issues. Thought it would be useful to share these. There's a lot to read, so thanks for reading if you get to the end.
BACKGROUND
As some background, I have a 2.8GHz IMac with 4GB RAM. First I uninstalled my third party Flickr uploader. Then rebooted and checked it had gone. Then installed all available updates via software update. Then rebooted. Then checked for all available updates via software update again. Then logged onto my Flickr pro account via Safari and deleted all of my photos on Flickr. Then rebooted. Then installed ILIfe 09.
It took about an hour scanning my photos for faces.
FACES
1. Initial observations – it’s very good and clever, but it does miss a lot of faces. Also when you’re clicking to confirm, or double-clicking to to decline, it would be good if you could say “no, it’s not Maria as you’ve guessed, actually it’s Sandra”, rather than just double-clicking to say “no it’s not Maria” (and then effectively losing the Sandra opportunity!)
2. After the initial dump of faces, I then tried importing 50 brand new photos directly into IPhoto 09. It then didn’t pick up any of the faces, so I had to go in manually adding the faces. Any reason for this?
3. After a couple of hours, on my corkboard I had 30 faces. An hour later, without me having added any more faces, suddenly I’ve got 25 faces. No idea where the missing 5 went. I then went about creating 3 of the missing 5 faces, taking me to 28 faces. An hour later, suddenly I’ve got about 35 faces! When I looked at the corkboard, some of my faces had been duplicated. For example, there were now 2 Rachel’s on my corkboard. When I clicked on one of them, it told me I had 8 pictures of Rachel, and then showed me the 8 pictures. When I clicked on the other, it told me I had 2 pictures of Rachel, but when I drilled down, no pictures of Rachel were displayed, even though there was supposed to be 2…!! Incidentally – on the cork board, where I now had 2 Rachel’s, the ‘key photo’ for both Rachel’s was the same photo. I then deleted all my duplicates. So all in all, a bit flakey!
4. I then had a go at entering the email addresses of some of my faces, but when clicking on the info button on the face, the 3D animation which then follows to allow you to enter the details went very slowly. When I tried to overtype “enter email address” with the email address, it kept refusing the email address and reverted to “enter email address”. The only way to fix this was to reboot.
FACEBOOK
1. When pressing the export to facebook button, it asks for an account credentials. I supplied my own credentials. It then happily exported 30 photos. When I logged onto Facebook to have a look, it had correctly tagged Brad in 5 pictures, Maria in 3 pictures and Rachel in 8 pictures. HOWEVER, for the 8 Rachel pictures, it only identified 3 out of those 8 as Rachel on Facebook, the other 5 just being Rachel. Hope that makes sense! This is definitely a bug, as Rachel’s email address was entered on the corkboard before I pressed the facebook button, therefore all 8 should have been identified as Rachel on Facebook. I even tried overtyping her email address on the corkboard and then re-syncing with Facebook, but it made no difference. I deleted the album and re-exported it with no difference.
2. I then tried switching accounts, so after pressing the facebook button, entered my wife’s username and password for facebook, to see if IPhoto supported multiple facebook accounts. Even though it accepted my wife’s credentials, it still then says “you are about to publish to Brad’s facebook account” and ignores my wife’s credentials.
MAPS
1. When trying to manually enter location information it tells me I’m not connected to the internet, when clearly I am, and can use IPhoto Facebook exporter, use Google Maps via Safari, etc.
FLICKR
1. I tired highlighting multiple events. I then pressed the flickr button. I was a bit disappointed that when the load gets to flickr, it is merged as one event (aka ‘flickr SET’). So to upload multiple events, I’ll have to do them one at a time. Ah well, never mind.
2. I’ve now uploaded 3 sets to flickr. However, every time I start IPhoto, the sync icons start turning next to every set on the flickr section on the left hand side of IPhoto (even if I'm not interested in doing anything with Flickr). This makes the operation of IPhoto slow. This will mean trouble when I'm up to 100 flickr sets!!!
3. I've downloaded a 4th set to flickr containing 300 photos. All was well and the photos are on flickr. Then an hour later, it proceeded to delete the Flickr set, so that now it says “(0)” after the flickr set rather than "(300)". Clicking on the name of the flickr set displays no photos! However, when I log onto flickr direct, the 300 photos are actually there. After a reboot, IPhoto insists there are still zero photos in the set, and there is no icon next to the set (to re-sync with flickr), like there is with my other 3 sets. So what do I do now? All I can think of is deleting via Flickr and uploading all 300 photos again!
STABILITY
1. Random crashing. The beachball appears after doing certain things and won't go away. I then have to force-quit. This is the first time I've ever had to use force-quit in my 10 months of being a Mac user.
2. Slowness. The application eventually grinds to a virtual halt after a few hours. The animations go slow, typing in text gets ignored, and eventually I have to reboot.

Answer 1

iPhoto has a new Web preference pane and in it is an option to check for newly published photos. I don't know if it checks you filckr acco
unt or must Mobileme but you might set the option to check manually and see if some of the strange behavior goes away. It probably will increase iPhoto's speed if it's not checking online all the time.
TIP: For insurance against the iPhoto database corruption that many users have experienced I recommend making a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto (iPhoto.Library for iPhoto 5 and earlier versions) database file and keep it current. If problems crop up where iPhoto suddenly can't see any photos or thinks there are no photos in the library, replacing the working Library6.iPhoto file with the backup will often get the library back. By keeping it current I mean backup after each import and/or any serious editing or work on books, slideshows, calendars, cards, etc. That insures that if a problem pops up and you do need to replace the database file, you'll retain all those efforts. It doesn't take long to make the backup and it's good insurance.
I've created an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger or later), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. There are versions that are compatible with iPhoto 5, 6, 7 and 8 libraries and Tiger and Leopard. Just put the application in the Dock and click on it whenever you want to backup the dB file. iPhoto does not have to be closed to run the application, just idle. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.
NOTE: iPhoto 8's new option in it's rebuild library window, "Rebuild the iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup" may make this tip obsolete. We'll know when users have occasion to use it and see if that's the case.