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#1 2009-04-10 11:40 am
- dcalfine
- B&
- From: The City
- Registered: 2003-12-01
- Posts: 2413
DEAD SLOW iPhoto importing onto an external hard drive
My sister has an iMac G5 (20", 1.8GHz) that's almost five years old. It's running 10.5.6 and I recently installed the new version of iLife. In the same day, I moved her iPhoto library to an external hard drive (one of the black LaCie ones with FireWire, USB and eSATA) because her internal drive was full. I recommended just getting a bigger internal drive but she wanted the ability to use the drive with a different computer. The LaCie is plugged in through FireWire 400, so I figured accessing it would be a little slower than if it were plugged in internally, but since I moved her iPhoto library onto the external drive and gave her the new version of iPhoto, she complains that importing photos is painfully slow. I think she said that in three hours she was only able to import seventy photos (which I think are JPGs, not RAW or anything.)
I'm not really sure how to help her, and since I don't have easy access to the computer, I can't really try things on a whim. Frankly, I think it's time to get a new computer, but that's not really in the cards. The only idea I can come up with is performing an archive install of the OS on the internal. Would that help? What else do you suggest?
Thanks.
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#2 2009-04-10 11:46 am
- sturner
- Royal High Poobah
- Moderator
- From: Carrollton, TX USA
- Registered: 2000-01-31
- Posts: 13795
Re: DEAD SLOW iPhoto importing onto an external hard drive
The install might improve the performance a bit. How big is her iPhoto library? That may be where the slowdown is coming, as well as it being external. However, I don't remember having that problem when I accessed from an external drive.
Look to repair permissions, and ensuring that there is at least 10% of the internal hard drive free for the use of the OS.
I'm not dead yet.
There are 3 types of people, those who can count and those who can't.
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#3 2009-04-10 11:53 am
- dcalfine
- B&
- From: The City
- Registered: 2003-12-01
- Posts: 2413
Re: DEAD SLOW iPhoto importing onto an external hard drive
The iPhoto library is fairly massive (84 gigabytes, I believe) but importing speeds were tolerable when the library was on the internal drive. Also, with 84 GB freed up on the internal, almost 60% of it is now free space.
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#4 2009-04-14 12:48 pm
- pottymouth
- Uncreative
- Moderator
- From: JP, MA
- Registered: 2002-02-06
- Posts: 17410
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Re: DEAD SLOW iPhoto importing onto an external hard drive
I use an external Firewire for my photo library (~400GB) and have no problems importing 12MP RAW, JPG, or even 50-70MB scanned PSDs. Just saying that Firewire 400 has more than enough bandwidth for this.
So it could be a slow drive enclosure, something wonky with the iMac, or maybe a funny formatted hard drive. Do you happen to know what format the HD is? If it's used just as it came out of the box it might be formatted FAT, which has always been unbearably slow for me. Check that out. If she doesn't need to use it with a PC it should be formatted HFS.
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