Iphoto unbelievably slow, then magically fast as lightening, then slow.

Question

So, here is my issue, I'm hoping you can help! I've never had many problems with my Iphoto, usually if it was slow I would just restart the computer and all would be fine. I lately have been scanning in old family photos in order to make my parents a scrapbook, and that is when the problems began. My computer is not super powerful, it has 1.83 GhZ, 512 MB of memory, and I am using 61 GB out of 75GB. My Iphoto lags EVERY time I do anything in regards to editing/cropping/ or moving from one pic to the next while in edit mode. I have NO faces OR places because I thought that would make it better. I have rebuilt using the bottom option, have repaired the disk, and have deleted the preferences. However, that is not the weirdest part! Yesterday, I was in the middle of editing a photo, which took a solid 5 minutes, when I had to leave for work immediately. I left the ADJUST button open when I left, and today when I got back onto Iphoto (almost 24 hours later) Iphoto was suddenly working like magic. I was able to edit every single photo in that event without a single lag, beachball, or slowing of any kind. I thought all my problems had gone away! THen, I switched to a second event to do some more editing, and again I had the beachballs and severe lag. To me, this does NOT make sense. Can anyone help me? There are no Console messages besides me forcing the exit of Iphoto, and I am not having any other problems with the computer. In fact, I just cleared out a whole bunch of storage by deleting past photos. Thank you in advance, Juliana

Answer 1

Welcome to the Apple Discussions. Yours is a unique problem. You've done everything I can think of. You have plenty of free space on your boot drive. Do you work in the Photo mode or Event mode? If the photo mode do you have the Event Titles displayed? To help iPhoto work as fast as possible it's best to have EVent titles displayed in the Photos mode and have all Events closed except the one you're working on. This is especially true when opening iPhoto since it will not have to render every thumbnail during the launch.
Open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on it while you're working in iPhoto to see if you can tell what processes come into play when iPhoto gives your the SWOD (spinning wheel of death). Of course more memory can help overall performance but the fact that you get good performance at times indicates that it's not just a memory issue.