iPhoto Import
When importing photos from any of my cameras (Nikon D100, smaller pocket Sony or iPhone) it takes forever! I seriously feel like I should have a fully charged camera when I begin to import. They're not huge files either.
Does anyone else experience this? I have a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro with 2 GBs of memory. Not a screaming fast machine but not a slug either.
Does anyone else experience this? I have a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro with 2 GBs of memory. Not a screaming fast machine but not a slug either.
Comments
When importing photos from any of my cameras (Nikon D100, smaller pocket Sony or iPhone) it takes forever! I seriously feel like I should have a fully charged camera when I begin to import. They're not huge files either.
Does anyone else experience this? I have a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro with 2 GBs of memory. Not a screaming fast machine but not a slug either.
It's pretty simple: Get a card reader. For about $20, you can get one at a camera shop, or online etc, and it can transfer different sized cards directly to your computer. Aside from speed, you ease up on the battery and camera wear and tear. For years I resisted these card readers, then finally saw the advantages. One last thing: If ever you've maxed out your SD card memory in your camera, you can ONLY retrieve the images via a reader as the camera will be too stuffed to do anything.
Feynman-- you really really Really need more RAM. This will help with this and almost any other task on your machine. But that doesn't negate the fact that iPhoto is just slow.
Once you start the import it's quick, then "finishing import" is also slow as hell.
Some bright spark developer decided that iPhoto should run facial recognition after import - that's how they can split photos by person. If you import 200-300 pictures at the resolutions coming out of cameras these days, which are usually over 3000 pixels, that's a slow process and I'd expect it to use a fair amount of RAM depending on how many images they process in parallel.
Apple's solution: They either need to allow you to turn it off or do the processing on the GPU.
Consumer's solution: Don't use iPhoto.
I personally don't like iPhoto's filing system and you can import photos much more quickly using Image Capture in the Applications folder. Then you can use another more powerful image editing program like Pixelmator or Aperture and manage the folders manually. This way you aren't wasting GBs of space having about 3 duplicates of every photo and having every photo remain at full size.
Consumer's solution: Don't use iPhoto.
That's not a solution for Joe Blow, Jane Doe, and Auntie Meredith, though.
I personally don't like iPhoto's filing system
Worse: I don't trust it anymore after it inexplicably and unrecoverably crashed my tens of thousands of photos a few years ago. The entire iPhoto file system was corrupted. I was shocked. Luckily my strict backup regimen saved 95% of them. It still cost me 8 weeks to manually clean up the mess. I've used the simplest of Finder folder/file systems for my photo storage since and rarely if ever use iPhoto anymore.
Imo iPhoto is a crummily built application that cannot be trusted to safekeep your photo collection.
Imo iPhoto is a crummily built application that cannot be trusted to safekeep your photo collection.
And Aperture is now dirt cheap! ... Too powerful for most consumers, but now cheap enough that they can justify using it anyway. (It doesn't demand a proprietary file structure.)