iPhoto 09 hangs on startup

Question

Every time I run iPhoto 09 on snow leopard it hangs after displaying the main window. The "beach ball" goes on forever and I have to force quit.

Anybody knows what might be going on?

Answer 1

Same problem here, but not able to sort it out yet. Mine happened after accidentally interrupting an import from my iPhone.

Possible solutions:

• Repair disk permissions using Disk Utility
• Delete iPhoto Caches from ~/Library/Caches/com.Apple.iphoto
• Delete preference file (as above) from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPhoto.plist
• Restart iPhoto with cmd and alt held down, and rebuild library, databases, thumbnails etc, or restore from the automatic backup.
• Use iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild library
• Hold down alt as you start iPhoto, and create a new clean library

None of these have so far worked for me: iPhoto starts up, seems fine (displays all of my images) but beachballs as soon as I click in the photo library pane, or try and import an image in to a clean library.

Other possible solutions I've seen mentioned.

• Create a clean user account and see if you still have problems after importing the library.
• Turn off the Photo library sharing options in iPhoto preferences (I can't do this as my hang prevents me accessing this)
• Clean reinstall of iPhoto
• Possible issues with external disks (depending on partition table format)
• Possible issues with faces scans.

I am on 10.6.6 / iPhoto 9.1.1 (= iPhoto '11) - around 10k images in the library.

Sources of information are linked, but arg, can only post two, so will add follow up comments with additional ones.