Why on earth does iPhoto take so long to preview?

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Heya everyone :)

Navigating through iPhoto is a breeze and is fine (and fast) UNTIL i ask it to render a print preview!

I just finished editing a photoshoot of around 100 photos, when asking iPhoto to create a Print preview (which it does in a PDF), the laptop crawls to a halt. It took nearly 5 mins to create what I woulda thought should of been simple?

Perhaps im just being impatient and expecting to much?

~~ TS ~~
 
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Hm that is a long time for your hardware.
Have you tried repairing permissions?
How large are these photos?
 
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Each photo comes in between 2mb and 4mb.

As for repairing permissions, I havent done that recently but I'll do that now if you think its the way forward :)

~~ TS ~~
 
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I've tried something similar on my 2GHz CD macbook with 1.25GB of RAM and it does seem to take a ridiculous length of time to preview. I'm not sure why, but it does seem to be slow.
 
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Im now running Disk Utility (Boot from CD) :)

~~ TS ~~
 
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Ok when running the permissions fix it found a fair few errors but nothing really related to iPhoto although some interesting ones have been found. Ive typed the short version from the filepath it gave. Im also going to run verify disk now :)

Flashplayer
Library Widgets
etc/authorization
fetchmail
i386/boot.efi

~~ TS ~~
 
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Well Verify disk passed without any issues so where should i go from here?

Should i just wait till a new version of iPhoto?

~~ TS ~~
 
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Keep in mind you are asking the system to do a great deal of work.

I just did a set of 95 images that took 2 minutes and 18 seconds and the saved PDF file had a size just over 61MB. Perhaps the GPU is helping me. My FINE 7.1 megapixel jpegs range in size from about 2.2MB to 3.2MB.
 
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Oh, you're trying to make a pdf of 100 photos ?? Yeah man, that will take a long time! haha
I thought you HAVE a 'hunnert' photos but were trying to preview just one.
Well, you may try rebuilding your photo caches/etc. Quit iPhoto. When you relaunch it, hold down COMMAND+OPTION.

xstep... your avatar is broken. I ask it for my fortune... nothing. I filled my cd slot with quarters and still nothing. What gives?
 
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xstep... your avatar is broken. I ask it for my fortune... nothing. I filled my cd slot with quarters and still nothing. What gives?
It's a false front just like Windows is to OS X. ;)

Actually I hadn't thought of it that way. When I read your comment, I laughed out loud.
 
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I mean... it gives me a nod. Like something magical is about to happen. But I don't hear that sparkly sound or anything. Nothing.
 
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i have just tried to print preview about 20 photos and yes it does take a long time - not sure why

but my guess would be the hd usage
 
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It takes long because photos are stored in a compressed state. A 2mb photo can actually take 20MB. It depends on the compression. One of my 2.1MB JPEG photo opens up to a 14.4MB file.

So a hundred photos could require about 2GB of working memory - when you run out of ram you'll start to swap to HD. And that doesn't even count the overhead of actually working with all that data.

TS stated his files are between 2MB and 4MB = 15MB and 30MB * 100 = wowGB
 
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I just gave this more thought. It takes a good amount of time to write a few GBs to disk. So imagine reading and writing a a few GB several times in order to get the job done. Then throw disk fragmentation in the mix.
 

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