Now that summer’s here and you’re taking a zillion pictures while you’re on vacation, here are a couple tips you can use to keep your iPhoto zinging.

Item Counts

If you’re on a G4 or other pre-Intel Mac, you may find the Library achingly slow.  The culprit may be the little numbers in the ovals on each folder telling you how many pictures are inside.

But while handy, constantly counting your pictures slows down the program, to the point that you may think it’s crashed.

If you find this slowdown while modifying your photos, Go into iPhoto Preferences. Under the General button, the second checkmark says “Show item counts.” It may take a moment for the checkbox to update, so be patient.

Depending on your computer, this tip may either make you feel like you tripled your RAM…or do nothing at all. But it’s worth a try.

Empty iPhoto Trash

Because digital photos don’t cost a penny, you’re probably in the habit of taking a bunch of shots to make sure you’ve got the perfect one. And when you download them to iPhoto, you should be ruthless to keep just one or two.  You don’t need 4 copies of every group shot!

But even when you delete your pictures, they’re not really gone. iPhoto has it’s own Trash, separate from the Trash on your Dock.

I just clicked on the Trash icon in my iPhoto the other day, and was shocked…I had 1,347 photos in it! Amazing, since I only have 2,774 photos in my Library. While I’ve trimmed my photos down by 33%, I never actually got rid of them. They’re still taking up all that disk space.

First, I backed up my computer using Time Machine (if you don’t have Time Machine, use your favorite backup strategy).

Next, I looked through to make sure there weren’t any that I really needed (nope, just my duplicates and the bad shots). Then, I went up to the iPhoto menu and chose “Empty iPhoto Trash.”  It took a few minutes, and when I was done I had an extra 1.5 GB of space on my hard drive!