Strangest iPhoto 4 Bug
First, a bit of background: I'm in the process of merging together a about 1000 pictures from a vacation I took this summer, but about 100 of them are from a camera that thought it was in a different time zone. So, I'm needing to roll back the times on these 100 photos by an hour. I start doing it with the text field in the bottom left corner, and I notice that after changing about five photos, iPhoto bogs down. I get a spinning cursor, and the more I change, the longer iPhoto spins away.
So, I quit, and start doing it again. Same thing. I quit again, and this time, I record the length of time iPhoto is maxing out my processor after each change. Here's what I got: (drum-roll)
3
8
24
60
174 seconds, and then I gave up.
What in the world! Why on earth would anything like this be happening? Anyone else ever get this? And it's definitely reproducible, at least on my machine.
I'm using iPhoto 4, and have 3500 pictures...I just don't get it. I thought it was good up to 25000.
So, I quit, and start doing it again. Same thing. I quit again, and this time, I record the length of time iPhoto is maxing out my processor after each change. Here's what I got: (drum-roll)
3
8
24
60
174 seconds, and then I gave up.
What in the world! Why on earth would anything like this be happening? Anyone else ever get this? And it's definitely reproducible, at least on my machine.
I'm using iPhoto 4, and have 3500 pictures...I just don't get it. I thought it was good up to 25000.

Comments
On a side note, this seems to be a common enough problem that Apple might want to concider a time adjusting feature in iPhoto 5.
Originally posted by talksense101
I have adjusted the photograph time stamp on several hundred pictures using the batch change feature without any problems. I use a 1.25GH iMac G4.
Is there a way to use batch change to add an hour to a bunch of photos? I don't see how to do it.
Originally posted by Hobbes
Weird. Have you tried trashing iPhoto's pref + cache, rebooting, etc?
Yup. No changes whatsoever. I'm using an 800MHz G4, so my computer's not rediculously slow.
And, I'm seeing an exponential increase in time... so, if it does happen on other computers it should show up after a certain number of changes regardless of how fast the computer is.
I'm not using the batch change, because, unfortunately, it doesn't do time-shifting. And I tried to applescript it, but the date field is stupidly read only. So, I'll just do it the way Apple wants me to do it, and quit after every ten changes to restart the exponential compounding of the time.
Everybody: Quick... submit feedback! to get batch time-shifting.
Anyone know where in the xml the roll info is stored?
Originally posted by JBL
Is there a way to use batch change to add an hour to a bunch of photos? I don't see how to do it.
There isn't a feature to add a delta to each individual photo's existing timestamp. I assign a base date/time and add a time difference between each. That suits my requirements.