Copying iPhoto Library too slow? Here is a trick.

Found to my surprise that my mac needs 24 hours to copy a 45 GB iPhoto Library to the USB hard disk. Why? Because the iPhoto Library itself is a package of tens of thousands of files. It doesn't help that iPhoto itself generates thousands of files on its own.

The trick is that it takes far shorter time if you copy 45 GB as a single file into the USB media (because you avoid tens of thousands slower filesystem calls / writes onto the USB media).

Try this method to reduce the copying to a "mere" few hours:

1) Tar up the iPhoto Library. Prefer tar to compression as your JPEG and MOV are already highly compressed, so doing compression would be a waste.

Open up the Terminal in Mac OS. Use "tar -cf your_name.tar your_original_iPhoto_Library".

This took a long enough time for my iPhoto Library, maybe 1 hour.

2) Copy the your_name.tar into the USB. As one big binary blob, the copying is much faster. Takes about 20 mins in my case.

3) At the destination mac, just untar it in a directory of your choosing.

Open up the Terminal. Use "tar -xf your_name.tar". This took less than 1 hour.