Journal: News & Comment

Is rebuilding the iPhoto database worth it?

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

[See above for some additional tips.]

Computers are pretty powerful. Even my five-year-old Power Mac is a number crunching machine, which is why it shocked me that rebuilding my photo database in Apple's iPhoto—just hit Shift-Option while it starts up—took eleven hours. (Luckily, I could do other things while it worked.) That's by far the longest it's ever taken any of my computers to do any single task.

I have about 5400 photos stored, taking up around 5 GB of disk space. The space savings at the end? About 5%. Speed improvements? Zilch.

And it screwed up the order of all my iPhoto film rolls. So I went back to my old photo database by editing the com.apple.iphoto.plist text file that lives in my Library/Preferences folder. Sorry to put you through all that effort for no result, little machine.

CORRECTION: It turns out that processing a SETI@home work unit takes my computers longer than eleven hours. So I should have said "...by far the longest it's ever taken any of my computers to do any single task that I was paying attention to."

 |