IPhoto won't quit! Empty trash with 8000 +....

Question

Cleaned up iPhoto, deleting, now have 8000+ images in iPhoto trash. Click iPhoto Trash>Empty Trash, and separate upper right "Empty Trash" button... neither one will dump all these photos.... And the program freezes with swirling after the box shows it is emptying iPhoto trash.... NOT. Please help, after many tries this is becoming ugly.

Answer 1

Hello Old Toad:
Thank you for your suggestion. I've seen it in other discussions.
I've been using iPhoto for many years. I've been using a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo 2007 era iMac the whole time. I'm now using iPhoto v8.1.2.
My iPhoto library is now quite large with about 40,000 photos and about 175 G in total size. I have put a lot of time into organizing the photos. Everything is religiously backed up.
Over the past year or so the performance of iPhoto in terms of speed has been slowly declining. It takes a long time to open, but the most cumbersome is the spinning beach ball when I "commit" to enhancements to a photo I've made (contrast, saturation, sharpness etc). Recently that beach ball could actually take 3-5 minutes. I find this intolerable.
So I started researching this to see if others have the problem. As best I can make out after a few hours of research is that my library is too large and my computer too old. I don't want to replace my computer becuase of iPhoto so I started researching the idea of splitting my library into smaller libraries.
I found several 3rd party programs (iPhoto Buddy, iPhoto Library Manager) that made it seem they may be able to help me easily split my library into several libraries. Unfortunately neither actually does this but instead tells you how you need to do that manually.
The methods to split your library manually they suggest are horrendously tedious for a 40,000 photo library with over 1,000 carefully constructed Events.
And this brings me to where I stand today. I copy my entire library to an external hard drive, open the copied library and what I WANT to do is prune it to say 1/10 of the size (say two years of my photos). (Realize I'll have to do this process of copying my entire library 10 times, and pruning each time.)
But then I find out that iPhoto totally chokes when you try to trash more than "80-100" photos at a time! Morever, I come to find out that emptying the trash of even 80 photos takes 3-5 minutes!
Although I appreciate the help and advice, perhaps you can understand my frustration with Apple. I'm literally an indentured servant to iPhoto if I want to preserve all the work I've done on my library. I'd switch to another program if it would preserve all my events but I can not find one that does.
1. The performance of their software declines with no warning to the point where it can't be used unless you're unemployed and have nothing else to do.
2. You look for a fix and find you have to split your library.
3. When you try to split your library you find it will takes days and days of tedious work to complete.
So that is my story. That is why I'm so angry with Apple.
Have I missed anything or am I doomed to this dreary work?
Thank you for any help and guidance you can provide.