Important update for iPhoto
by Volker Weber
Apple updates iPhoto to 5.0.4. The download is 40 meg and there is only one change:
iPhoto 5.0.4 addresses an issue with browsing photos that have been auto-rotated by a camera.
I hope this change makes iPhoto once again usable for me. Since I bought the Nikon D70 and shot a lot of frames, iPhoto has taken up huge amounts of memory and takes minutes to load. I did not really understand what caused the problems. It was not the number of images, since I have older libraries that have a lot more photos. But this is my first camera that auto-rotates portrait shots, so the older libraries don't have this particular type of frames.
My first tests show that update is indeed improving things. Instead of a 1.2 gig working set iPhoto now uses only 360 meg of virtual memory and 60 meg of real memory.
Update: This may have been a bit premature. iPhoto peaked at 930 meg virtual and 370 meg real memory. It's now idling at 660/164.
Comments
Have you tried rebuilding the library (via holding—AFAIR—Option and Command during iPhoto startup)? Just a wild guess, though …
exiftran does the job of rotating jpegs the right way
Hit for being stupid, naiv or whatever. But not being an expert on digital photography and imaging I wonder what extreme difference the rotation of a photo (JPEG or TIFF, I assume, possibly RAW) can cause in the handling of the file? Since it seems only to occur when the camera already rotates the picture, what does the camera software do different than workstation software??? Do you have any info on that maybe?
The camera does not rotate the picture. It writes an orientation flag. The software then displays the image accordingly. You should also never try to rotate a picture by opening, decompressing, rotating, compressing, saving the file.
I am not yet sure in which way exiftran does it "the right way". Maybe Karsten can explain the difference between the right and the wrong way.
VOlker, does iPhoto display Nikon NEFs or do you take all your pictures as JPEGs?
Jpeg only.
~ 40 MByte, shame on apple! God bless DSL!
Moritz, if you like iPhoto and want to take RAW pictures, but your camera isn't supported, have a look at this article
