[X4U] iLife '06 Capacity and Performance

[Andrew Lynch]

 Well,  I got all 32,000 images merged into a single library. At the end of the merge the memory image was 1.5Gb.  When I quit iPhoto and restarted, the memory image had dropped to 675M.  Performance seemed fine, I could scroll back and forth at will. There is a moment when you stop scrolling when the images "focus" or increase in resolution.  It seems that they are scrolling a low res image, and replace it with a higher res thumbnail once movement stops.  There is just enough of a delay to be slightly annoying.  I noticed no pauses in responsiveness.

  This is on a dual 2.7Ghz with 1.5Gb ram.

  While I cannot be sure, it seemed that the last image imported took longer than the first, but since I went in chronological order, and my image sizes increased over time, the last image was also larger than the first by a fair margin (2 megapixel->6 megapixel).  Even the large 8,000 6mp image original library imported more quickly than I expected.  I did not time it, but my guess is that it took about 20 minutes.

One other thing I noticed was that pressing "2" to get the optimal thumbnail size got different result sizes on different libraries.

One thing I did notice was that my keywords got messed up during the merge.  I was using the "create an IPHOTO.XML file, put it in a directory with the original iPhoto Library and create a disk image of the folder" method to merge, since I wanted to keep my keywords and originals.

I'm starting over now, reading each library into the new iPhoto and letting it rebuild the library before making the disk images and doing the import step.

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Andrew T. Lynch