Remember when iPhoto 4 was announced and SJ said that it could now easily handle 10,000 images? Well, he was right that iPhoto performs fairly well with 10k images. 10,001 is another story. Read More…
Remember when iPhoto 4 was announced and SJ said that it could now easily handle 10,000 images? Well, he was right that iPhoto performs fairly well with 10k images. 10,001 is another story.
After I found out that iPhoto had finally been architected to handle large amounts of images I excitedly began loading all of my archived photos from DVD. As I crept up to the magical 10,000 photo milestone I was surprised that the app still performed well and was able to scroll reasonably fast in a small thumbnail view. But then I got to 11,000 images and everything went south from there. Scrolling started to bog down, delays opening the edit view, rotated images getting corrupt and distorted. The list goes on.
The last straw was when my iPod Photo arrived and I could not sync photos because of a corrupted iPhoto library. After all of the issues I have been having with large volumes of photos I decided to archive them all to DVD and to start fresh.
First I burned DVDs of all of my photos by year, by twirling down the reveal triangle under iPhoto Library. Then I burned a DVD of all of my active photo albums. While this is definitely a duplicate of photos that are elsewhere I wanted to preserve my albums. After burning four DVDs, I did the entire exercise again and burned four more and marked them “Backup.” I put the masters away in a safe deposit box and use the Backups to re-build my photo library.
With iPhoto quit, I re-named my iPhoto Library (in Pictures) “iPhoto Library.archive” then re-launched the application which re-build the library. Now I am slowly re-building my “active” iPhoto library with only the photos that I need to carry around with me. The rest are archived to DVD if I need them later.
Now what am I going to do with all this extra hard drive space?
What is your strategy for backing up and/or archiving photos?
