Stalling during a long operation
Occasionally, when performing a long operation such as merging libraries or rebuilding a library, iPhoto Library Manager’s progress can reach a certain point and then just stop. The most common reason for this is that iPhoto itself is experiencing some problem that has caused it to stop responding to further commands from iPhoto Library Manager. There are a few typical causes of this:
- iPhoto is displaying an error message. If iPhoto has trouble importing particular photos or movies, it can sometimes end up displaying an error window describing the problem it had, and what photos/movies it was unable to import. As long as this error window is being displayed, iPhoto will not respond to further commands, and iPhoto Library Manager will not be able to continue on to import the next event’s worth of photos. Unfortunately, there is no way to either prevent these windows from coming up in the first place, or to dismiss them automatically. If you see such a window displayed by iPhoto, simply dismiss the error window, and that should get the photo copying process moving again.
- iPhoto stalls while importing photos. iPhoto will occasionally have a problem where it will stall midway through importing a batch of photos. In this case, the “Importing Photos” screen is visible in the iPhoto window, but the progress bar indicating how many photos have been imported stops moving forward. Clicking the “Stop Import” button has no effect, and if you tell iPhoto to quit, it refuses, saying that there is still an import in progress. The only option in this case is to force quit iPhoto.
- iPhoto hangs and is totally unresponsive. As with many programs, iPhoto will occasionally hang completely and stop responding to mouse clicks or other input, displaying the infamous “spinning rainbow” cursor. The only thing to do in this case is to force quit iPhoto.
Force quitting iPhoto
In the cases above where force quitting iPhoto is necessary, you can do so by pressing command-option-escape, which will bring up the Force Quit window. Select iPhoto in the list of applications and then click the “Force Quit” button to perform the force quit. If you do this in the middle of an iPhoto Library Manager operation, iPLM will see that iPhoto has quit and automatically relaunch it, then continue on with the rest of the copying operation.
If iPhoto was importing an event worth of photos at the time, that event’s photos and/or their metadata will likely not have been imported successfuly into the destination library. iPLM will note this in the log file that it generates though, so at the end of the operation, if you click the “View Log” button, you can search the log for the term “unexpectedly quit”. That will show you where the force quit happened, and which event was being imported at the time. You can then find that event in the original library and just copy it over manually instead.