Have you ever thought about splitting your iPhoto collections into a series of smaller ones? It might sound a bit pointless at first but by doing so, you could vastly improve the performance of iPhoto and make managing your photo collection considerably easier.
iPhoto Buddy allows you to do exactly this so that you can create, manage, and switch between multiple iPhoto Libraries with ease. For very large collections, you should notice a distinct improvement in the speed of iPhoto, increased flexibility in organizing your photos and a general overall improvement in how you're able to manage photos. However, it has to be noted that more recent versions of iPhoto have made many of the functions available in iPhoto Buddy redundant because simply by holding down the Option key when starting iPhoto, you can open collections in new libraries.
However, that's not to say that iPhoto Buddy has nothing more to offer. For instance, iPhoto Buddy displays several details about your Libraries without having to even launch iPhoto. This includes things such as the image count as well as the Albums, Smart Albums, Folders etc contained within them. The interface of iPhoto Buddy has clearly been inspired by iPhoto and is a pleasure to use throughout. The help manual is also highly detailed and covers just about any problem you might come across.
However, the improvements to be enjoyed from iPhoto Buddy will probably only be appreciated by those on slower Macs. I found little difference whether operating with one whole library or several different ones divided by iPhoto Buddy and indeed, found it even a little more confusing at times.
That said, there can be no doubt that for those on slower Macs or those that don't want to upgrade to newer versions of iPhoto, iPhoto Buddy will surely make managing your albums a lot quicker and easier.
