speeding up iPhoto if you use a Nikon or Canon digicam

This is a quick post to add some google-juice to issues with slow iPhoto launching and quitting, mainly to do with the burgeoning iPhoto.database file.

The crux of the matter seems to be that some metadata previously stored in .attr files (in iPhoto 4) has been merged into the database file, slowing down launching and closing iPhoto when reading and writing to this file. If you have a nikon or canon camera, this metadata can be up to 50k per photo; when your library is large, this turns into a big overhead.

Anyhow, i got the first tip from Macintouch: iPhoto (Part 14) – loading problems caused by file bloat. The hint mentions reimporting photos, but I just rebuilt the iPhoto library (below), and hopefully this will have the same effect.

The perl script to delete the metadata is: rmmn – remove makernote;

Info on rebuilding your iPhoto library is listed on: one world view …: How To Rebuild Your iPhoto Library. This bit takes some time, and I didn’t pick the option to rebuild thumbnails although I may do someday just for completeness.

So, I hope this helps someone somewhere…