New iPhoto 09 is Quite Broken
I have about 14,000 pictures in my iPhoto library. Almost all of them are pictures of people: digital photos going back 10 years, scans going back over 40 years.
I installed iPhoto 09. I was really excited about the face matching feature.
But two things happened:
iPhoto kept locking up at first, then would lock my Mac in a black screen (as if the screen saver was trying to start.) It would stay locked up like this for 20 minutes or more; I had to power cycle to get things back. If I ran activity monitor (before the screen went black), iPhoto appeared to be scanning every single photo in my library at a rate of about 1 per second.
Eventually, I managed to get iPhoto to start and not lock stuff up. Then it spent about 4 hours processing faces from the library. So I went to bed. Today, none of the photos in the library have a face frame on them. If I add one, it is forgotten when iPhoto restarts. No worky. I’ll have to stick with Lightroom.
Update: it turns out the upgrade of my iPhoto Library completely borked my Library. iPhoto thinks the “permissions” are wrong and is asking me to repair them. All the files are owned and writable by me, but they are on an external (Firewire 800) disk. So I have no idea what to fix. Standard lesson applies: back up your entire iPhoto Library before upgrading. I have a backup, but by this time it’s been overwritten by the nightly backup job, so now I have a backup of the fucked library. I don’t use Time Machine. It doesn’t work when you have 2.5 TB of shit.
I might just recreate the iPhoto Library from scratch, which sucks because I have some useful metadata in there.
Update 2: I made a backup, then I deleted two files: face.db and face_blob.db. Then I started up iPhoto, and it recreated the face database. I also copied the entire Library to my local disk, instead of having it on a direct firewire-attached drive. It’s no longer complaining about wrong permissions. So it’s working for me now, recognizing faces. Whew!
January 28th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Oh no! I just ordered iLife’09 specifically for this feature! (Does Lightroom have face detection? I used Lightroom 1.0 for a while but eventually found iPhoto to be much more ergonomic.)
January 28th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Hopefully it’s just bugginess and they fix it up with the next patch or two.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
That makes me so sad! I too am interested in the whole face thing; it seems really cool. If you do keep trying and do any better, I’d love to hear about it. But thanks for the warning; I’ll wait a bit before upgrading.
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Sadly, I didn’t backup my library before upgrading to ’09, so there’s no easy way to go back to ’08…
6500 photos in the library, and my symptoms are similar, lots of spinning beachballs and lockups but no complaints about permissions. But anything I try to do takes a while, and deleting photos is almost impossible.
To delete one photo takes about 30 sec to a minute to complete, then I get my cursor back but the next thing I try to do gives me another 30 sec of lockup. I can delete up to 10 or so at once if I don’t mind a 5-10 minute wait, but if I try to delete 16-20 or so the machine locks.
For comparison, no problems whatsoever in ’08. I never noticed any sluggishness at all until I upgraded, now I’m seriously considering moving all the photos back to a PC :(
February 6th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I’ve got my copy of iLife ’09 sitting in a box and I’m not going to install it until the first patch release is available. I’m already in a bad enough mood after discovering that iWork doesn’t seem to have the feature that was implied; I don’t need to have my photo library go south on me.
January 10th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
I am sooo disappointed with 09.. it’s so so slow and my pics in editing keep doing weird things. I HATE this 09 Iphoto!!!!
January 11th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Well. it’s not long before iPhoto 2010 will be out. Maybe that will focus on reliability and speed…