My crop tool is sticky

Question

My crop tool is sticky. Just by moving my cursor around, the crop frame moves with it even tho I have not clicked on the frame. I have an older iMac from 2008 and a brand new 27" iMac. I use a trackpad on both my macs. The same problem exists on both of them which seems strange. Just by moving my cursor around, the crop frame moves with it even tho I have not clicked on the frame. I no sooner get one side done and move to another side and the whole frame moves right along with me. I can't let go of it. Sometimes it takes off by itself (honestly!) and becomes long and very narrow or does some other weird thing and I have to press reset to start over only to have the same thing happen again. I have called Apple and they claim that no one else has ever complained about a similar problem. They had me trash the preferences iPhoto plist and start over with that. Sometimes it works fine for dozens of photos after doing that and other times it doesn't help at all. I have hundreds of old photos I'm making a slideshow out of in Keynote and everything is going great except for this one problem. I hesitate to reinstall iPhoto. Is that my only option?

Answer 1

Well, I've spent about an hour torturing the crop bars in iPhoto, trying to generate any kind of consistent bad behavior. When I first started, I was seeing problems occur about once every couple minutes, but not in any consistent way. I saw the crop frame change shape when nothing was selected and I was just moving the cursor. I saw the cross for corner manipulation track my cursor finger all the way into the center of the frame, even though I was not selecting anything. I saw one or more frame sides jump in or out a quarter inch or more at a time, when nothing was selected. This last was the most common misbehavior for about the first half hour. But the more I honed in on trying to recreate any problem, the less it started happening. I thought perhaps I'm doing something with my fingers on this new trackpad that the software is not interpreting the way I intend it to. I'm pretty sure at this point it's at least partly that, based on the diminishing occurrences as I experienced tonight.
In the last 15 minutes or so of constantly grabbing and moving corners, dragging the cursor over every part of the frame and photo with and without selecting things, the most I could get was twice when I was moving the cursor without selecting anything, and the whole crop frame shifted less than a quarter inch. I tried quitting iPhoto and restarting it, switching to different photos, and trying the same operation of selecting an area and trying to make it act goofy in a preview image I have up on the desktop. I even walked away for five minutes, rinsed my hands in water so they were nice and cold again, and I still can't get it to fail again. I think I'm done playing with it for tonight, but the next time it does misbehave, I'm going to plug in my usb mouse and see what happens. If it is a library issue, how I select things and control the cursor shouldn't make any difference, should it?
I've been using my bluetooth mouse on my mac mini (same versions of iPhoto and OS) to edit photos in iPhoto for the last three years, and I've never seen anything like these mis-behaviors.