I was recently asked to do some maintenance work on a relatives iMac, and one of their chief complaints was the speed of Photo Booth, the fun application that takes pictures and distorts them with your iSight. Upon inspection of the machine, I found that Photo Booth was running extremely slow, launching the application would take nearly a minute before the camera image would show up and the program was ready to use, and then actions within the app were dreadfully slow.
I quickly noticed that their picture count was over 2000 photos stored within Photo Booth! Apparently their kids are absolutely in love with the application and entertain themselves for hours on end just making goofy faces (alright I admit, I do this too).
So, if you haven’t guessed it yet, here’s my fix on how to speed up Photo Booth again in Mac OS X, and yes it works:
Fix Photo Booth running slow by clearing the stored pictures:
- Navigate to the users home directory and into their Pictures folder (/user/Pictures/)
- Create a new folder inside the Pictures directory and name it something like “Photo Booth backups”
- Find the folder named ‘Photo Booth’ – this is where Photo Booth stores its images
- Move all the images from ‘Photo Booth’ to “Photo Booth backups” – you can do this through the Finder GUI or the command line:
- Double check that the images are all in their new location and that the original directory is empty
- Relaunch Photo Booth and enjoy the application at it’s original speed
mv "/user/Pictures/Photo Booth/*" "/user/Pictures/Photo Booth backups/"
Why this works: Photo Booth’s stored pictures are loaded into memory when you launch the application, I found a direct correlation with the total picture count and the speed of the program. The more pictures, the more memory, the slower Photo Booth will run. This is all the more true on older machines with limited RAM. The solution is simple, just backup the Photo’s to another directory (or load them into iPhoto), and relaunch the program.
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