We use Apple’s iPhoto to manage our photo library, which as of this morning is 6,000 photos strong. Unfortunately, iPhoto has grown slower and slower as time goes on, and had become nearly unusable by the time I added the latest batch of photos.

So I did a little strategic web searching, and found two suggestions that have helped immensely:

1. Turn off drop shadows and borders in the program’s preferences.
2. Organize your photos by roll, and then collapse all the rolls you’re not actively using by option-clicking on one of the little collapse/expand arrows.

After doing these two things, iPhoto has sped up by about an order of magnitude. Ah, relief.