IPhone – iPhoto freezes when iPhone is connected

hangiphoneiphoto

The Title says it all. If I start iPhoto while my iPhone is connected via USB, iPhoto simply freezes, showing the beach ball all time. The only way to revive it is to kill the iPhoto process via the task manager and then to launch it again. iPhoto works ok when the phone is not connected.

I run Mavericks 10.9.3 on a 2013 MacBook Pro Retina 13" and the phone is an iPhone 5 with IOS 7.1.1.

Edit 1: iPhoto is version 9.5.1

Edit 2: The behavior is the same when I connect my iPad

Edit 3: Deleting the iPhoto library does not change the behavior in any way

Edit 4: Deleting iPhoto, the photo-library and everything under ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iPhoto/ does not solve the issue

Edit 5: Reinstallation of iTunes has no effect

Edit 6: Loading the photos works perfectly from the Image Capture app

Best Answer

How many photos are on your camera roll?

iPhoto is dynamically loading all the photos on you iPhone/iPad into your MacBook's memory. This is more-or-less the same thing as loading lots of very big picture files off a USB flash drive, so don't be surprised if it takes a (some times very) long time for large camera rolls. To be sure it hasn't choked on the huge number of files you have, open activity monitor or type top in a terminal window. You'll see a list of (almost) all the tasks currently running on your system. So long as iPhoto is taking a semi-significant amount of CPU time (it takes about 10% at idle on my 15-inch MBP), the process isn't hung and you're fine.

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