iPhoto Problems '08: Preferences Gone Wild

In case you've started having freezing/crashing problems with iPhoto lately, I might be able to save you some time. For me, iPhoto just started freezing up a few seconds after I opened it, only to be resolved with a force-quit.

After a bit of digging, I tracked the problem down to the sharing settings in iPhoto's preferences. If the application is crashing too fast for you to even get into this setting, you'll have to delete iPhoto's preference file, found here: username/Library/Preferences. Look for the file called com.apple.iPhoto.plist and delete it. Now, you should be able to open iPhoto without freezes, but it will probably look a little different. That's okay, you can set its appearance back to how you like it once you've fixed the problem.

From what I've discerned, the problem stems from having "Look for shared photos" AND "Share my photos" simultaneously selected. By default, "Look for shared photos" is selected. If you want share your photos, you have to FIRST deselect "Look for shared photos". It's dumb, but it seems like, for the time being, you can't have it both ways. I suspect that the last MobileMe update is the culprit, so, hopefully, it will be resolved soon.

Once the crashing seems to be fixed, you can go back and set the rest of your iPhoto preferences the way you like. It wouldn't hurt, though, to make a copy of your com.apple.iPhoto.plist and save it to your desktop, just in case some other preference change breaks iPhoto again - then you can restore it to its last working state by copying your good preference file back into your preferences folder (quit iPhoto first), overwriting the wack file.