One of the reasons Heidi and I haven’t put up the pics from our vacation is that it’s been an absolute pain to try to view and manage them inside iPhoto. With over 400 pictures to pare down, scrolling and moving to different pictures has been unbearably slow. While searching around, I found out a couple of things that might be of importance. Having more memory is definitely helpful (I’m only at 512MB on both my PowerBook and my iMac). I’ve seen recommendations of at least 1GB.

What’s made a bigger difference, though, was this tip I found on a forum site:

When viewing your photos and scrolling iPhoto does one of the following:

- If your thumbs are smaller or equal to 240×180 the iPhoto will resize those images and shw them there.

- If your thumbs are larger than 240 pixel then iPhoto will need to resize the original image to show it as a thumbnail.

Yep, the thumbnail size you use when browsing makes a huge difference.
Using the 240×180 size (or smaller) gives much better performance.

There’s an easy way to make sure you are using that size - when you are in the browser view, press the 1,2 or 0 key.

1 will take you to maximum size, 0 will show the smallest thumbnails, and 2 will show you the optimal 240×180 thumbnails.

I used the tip and browsed after hitting “2″ on the keyboard. It was definitely smoother and more useable. Wish it were a menu option instead of this random key. I wonder if it’s documented anywhere?