Use uncompressed TIFs to speed iPhoto

May 15, '03 10:21:00AM

Contributed by: danvtim

I never really used iPhoto because it seemed very under powered and boy was it slow. However, I needed some prints made up and I sent them as LZW compressed TIFs through iPhoto to Kodak. The program on my B&W G3 with a 600 mhz G4 was pretty slow and rather useless. So, I start playing around for the first time and liked iPhoto's workflow methodolgy. But the program was really slow.

As a part of my normal workflow, I convert my photos to TIFs for editing using LZW compression. The TIFs were 14 mb and the JPGs were 2.2mb, but both were just as slow in iPhoto. So, I thought that perhaps the problem isn't file size, but that iPhoto took time to both decompress and scale the thumbnails and photos. So, I converted my next set of 350 pics to uncompressed TIFs and sure enough, iPhoto was much much faster, specifically organizing and scaling the thumbnails as well as laying out a book. Since you should convert your photos to TIFs for editing and printing anyway, and hard drive space is inexpensive, try uncompressed TIFs for a much faster iPhoto.

Oh, you can use iPhoto itself to convert the files by exporting them and selecting TIF if you don't have Photoshop or another scriptable application.

[robg adds: I haven't tested these claims yet, but found the concept interesting. Can anyone confirm the speed increases with uncompressed vs. compressed images?]

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