Fix an iPhoto '11 slowdown

May 18, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: gregraven

As I've been adding photos to iPhoto '11 (9.1.3), it's been getting slower and slower. On Friday, it ground just about to a complete halt, such that even force quitting took about 20 minutes to accomplish.

According to Activity Monitor, there was no CPU activity and no network activity to speak of, which stumped me because I was assuming it was Faces or Spotlight laboring mightily away in the background.

After many trials and errors, I determined that the problem was due to my entries in the Accounts preference. I had MobileMe (times two), Facebook, Flickr, and six other e-mail accounts registered there. About a minute after each launch, iPhoto had been attempting unsuccessfully to connect with at least one of the accounts, which brought iPhoto, Finder, and any other open programs to a screeching halt.

As luck would have it, I was one of the lucky ones hit with MobileMe's latest outage, but after I deleted all the Accounts preference entries, iPhoto sprang back to life.

I subsequently determined that it is normal behavior for iPhoto to attempt indefinitely to connect to services listed in the Accounts preference, with no time-out or notification to the user about what is going on.

If you find yourself in this predicament -- iPhoto open but utterly unresponsive -- you may be able to shorten the time it takes your Mac to return control to you by severing all network connections (Ethernet, Airport, etc.), at which point iPhoto is supposed to detect the lack thereof and stop trying to connect.

[crarko adds: I have not experienced the issue, so I can't test that this fixes it. Sure sounds worth trying if you do, though.]

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