About a month ago, I wrote that turning off iPhoto sharing had solved a lot of my iPhoto problems. It did: iPhoto had been rendered entirely unusable because it would freeze (with the spinning beachball, sometimes called the ‘spinning pizza of death’ or SPOD) shortly after launch. I might be able to select a photo before it would freeze, but I couldn’t actually do anything with the program

That helped for a while, at least, but in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been hit with a very similar problem. I start iPhoto, and then any time from a couple seconds to a few minutes later, the program would freeze with the beachball etc. In this state, I could at least get a few things done: there was generally enough time for me to import photos from my camera or find a couple photos and export them to something else.

If I wanted to find a couple more photos, then, I’d have to force-quit iPhoto, launch it again, and start over. Hardly optimal.

I regularly troll through the Apple iPhoto discussion boards. I haven’t found them to be all that useful, honestly. Most of the people there have different problems from mine, and most of the people offering suggestions are, honestly, idiots. Nearly every thread involves a number of suggestions to upgrade to the latest version, even if the complainant initially specified that he’s got that version. People are constantly advising people to ‘repair permissions’ or to ‘rebuild the library’. This last one is at least relevant and obscure.

Anyway, today I actually found something that helped. It was originally posted in January, but I missed it then in all the ‘repair permissions’ threads. It’s simple, and it has once again made iPhoto usable for me:

I turned off the ‘last roll’ and date-based auto-albums. Specifically, I did this in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto \
ShowLastNRollsAlbum 0

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto \
ShowLastNMonthsAlbum 0

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto \
ShowYearAlbums 0

No problems since then. Admittedly, it’s been only a few hours since I did this, so the permanence of this fix is still somewhat up in the air: but iPhoto has been more stable in those few hours than it’s been in months.