In theory, according to Apple’s promotional literature, iPhoto is supposed to be able to handle up to 25,000 photographs in its library without a hiccup. I’d love to know what kind of hardware they were testing that on, because I’ve got around 7,000 photographs in my iPhoto library and it quite frequently brings my 2.0Ghz G5 to a standstill, if iPhoto doesn’t crash out entirely.
Annoying.
So, part of last weekend’s running around was picking up a small spindle of recordable DVDs so that I could back up the older photos and pull them out of my iPhoto library. Prairie and I hit Best Buy and found a spindle of fifteen recordable DVDs for about ten dollars.
Yesterday, I grabbed all my photos up through 2003 (only about 2.5Gb out of the 4.7Gb available) and told iPhoto to burn the DVD. It asked for a blank disc, I put one in…and it popped it right back out and asked again for a blank disc. “That’s odd,” I thought, and put the disc back in. This time iPhoto went ahead and started chugging away, and I didn’t think more of it.
Until iPhoto finished burning, and the disc never mounted on the desktop. I started trying to figure out what was going wrong, and then some small part of my brain kicked in. “Wait a second…aren’t there a couple different DVD formats?” Sure enough, I’d picked up a spindle of DVD+R discs, and the Superdrive in my G5 uses DVD-R discs. Crud.
I’m just glad the discs weren’t terribly expensive, and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience. Thanks to an Office Depot just a few blocks away from my apartment, I now have a spindle of 25 DVD-R discs (for only \$9.99, too — the sale goes through Jan. 8th, and that’s a pretty good deal, as their spindles of 50 DVD-Rs are priced at \$40), all my photos up through 2003 are successfully burned onto one disc, and most of 2004 (Jan-Nov is all that would fit on one DVD) is merrily burning away in the background as I type this.
Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible formats, though, especially so similarly named (one is “DVD ‘plus’ R(ecordable)”, and one is “DVD ‘dash’ R(ecordable)”, I guess, though it could just as easily be read as “DVD ‘minus’ R(ecordable)”, which is even more confusing). If I hadn’t had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I’d probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary.
“I Sit on Acid ’96” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1996, 4:31).