I don’t have many photos in iPhoto ’08, only about 990 or so. However, whenever I boot up iPhoto, it always freezes for a few seconds, before proceeding to show me all those photos I have. Here are some tips that I’ve discovered (or think) that may help make iPhoto ’08 faster in booting, scrolling, and displaying.

1. Strip the Intel/PPC part. Use an application to strip the Intel or PPC part of iPhoto. That part is wasted code, which not only saves space, but also helps iPhoto ’08 boot faster (MUCH MUCH faster). Use an application like Xslimmer (shareware), TrimtheFat (freeware), Leopard Cache Cleaner/Tiger Cache Cleaner (Inside menu bar “Clean——>DeFAT Application”), or MacPilot (“Tools—->Extract Intel-Only/PPC-Only Application”).

2. Go to preferences, and go to the second tab, or “Appearance”. Turn off Drop Shadow, and bring the background slider to all white. This speeds up the scrolling.

3. Go to preferences, and go to the third tab, or “Events”. Make sure that reflection isn’t on.

4. Set the view size to “0″, “1″, “2″, or “3″. For some reason, I found that the presets let iPhoto ’08 scroll smoothly.

5. Strip the languages. For some reason, this let’s iPhoto boot up faster. Uses something like Monolingual, or you can just use Xslimmer again, or CleanApp. CleanApp and Xslimmer are shareware