pasoccupe's Posts

Sixteen photos so far and it’s working beautifully. Seems like the answer is to watch the size of your images.

Some of these are still large, 6 or 7 megs (filesize), but some that were over 9+ megs. must have thrown things over the top. I probably need to work on downsizing even more. I’ll keep posting my progress. —ALSO—this may be significant and I haven’t explored it fully, but it may be that placing images on the cover caused the huge slowdown for me. So far, I have left the cover images out and will put them in at the end.

Thanks, Blurb! I’m really happy to pick this project back up again.

 Dan M.

Text editing now works very well with no hanging. Unfortunately, photo books with large photos—even a 10-page starter book—have the same issues, taking forever to move from page to page. I can’t work like this. 1.9.3 was my last hope. I give up.

Sorry, Blurb. It was a great idea.

OK, I did just that—removed 1.9.2 and installed 1.8 and it runs smoothly under Vista, so that’s what I’ll use until this problem with the newer version is sorted out. Note that if you do this, your newer books won’t open and you will have to recreate them from scratch, but far faster and easier than working with 1.9.

Dan

OK, still working on it—I am having speed issues with 1.9.2, both under Win2000 and Vista. Pretty much the same thing as above, though the program is more responsive under Win2000. Still, it is very frustrating to edit a text box for example. I can type a few words, then the cursor disappears while I am typing and the letter show up nine seconds later. Then it seems fine, until I make a mistake and hit the backspace key, which causes another long disappearance and lack of response. Moving photos around is slightly faster than under Vista, but still prone to long lags, even without intense disk activity.

I don’t know what’s going on. I really don’t want to give up on this. There has to be some way to speed this up.

The speed is somewhat comparable ot navagating these forums, which also seems to take a long time. The speed is very much the same for editing in Booksmart. The older versions were not like this at all!

 I even opened an old book that had 157 pages of lower-res images. I was using this to layout my photo book. It used to be very fast to move things around and make edits (v. 1.4…?) , but under 1.9.1 & 1.9.2, it crawls just like the books with higher resolution images.

Blurb, please fix this soon.

 Dan

I’m not seeing much improvement with v. 1.9.2.

Text editing still lags, the program is unresponsive, even without heavy disk access. I can type ten or more letters before they appear when editing text., flipping pages, even text pages, in edit mode takes forever. This is with only 12-14 jpegs in the library on only 2 of them inserted into the book.

Sadly, it looks like I have to give up and go elsewhere to do this. It’s a shame, after I invested so much time into it. I really was looking forward to my Blurb book!

OK, hold on <del>—I wrote that too quickly. It did make a big improvement, but after working for about 5 minutes, things slowed down a bit again. It’s still much more responsive, but I’m still seeing big lag times when, say, moving from the cover photo to editing the cover flap text, zooming the cover photo, clicking a menu item -</del> such as to change a theme or background… and I do still only have nine images in this new version of the book.  Sorry.

Thanks Ben! 

 Removing the NativeSmart.dll file fixed it for me. The program runs at top speed again. Yeah!

I have already posted elsewhere, but 1.9.1 is still running very slowly. I’m running under Windows Vista Premium with lots of hdd space, defragged disks, 3+gb memory and with no other programs running with it, but even with a mere 6 or 7 photos so far in my photobook, every change or adjustment is excruciating. Just typing out a photo caption drags—the letters appear seven or eight seconds after I start typing.

I upgraded to v. 1.9 and started a whole new photo book, thinking that would be easier than replacing the lower res. jpeg files in my ms. with larger versions. After placing only 4 photos for the cover images, Booksmart is crawling on me. (Windows Vista 32-bit (3+ gigs ram & plenty of hd space). Not sure what’s up with it yet, but sounds a lot like issues others are having.

A followup—I tried CutePDF writer and was able to produce a pdf with Booksmart running under Vista.

Even though Acrobat (full version 7) runs on my system, it crashes with when I used Booksmart to print to the "Adobe PDF printer" even though other programs can do this. I think it’s a memory issue. I have plenty of RAM, but my book is huge, so there probably is still not enough to put both Booksmart AND Acrobat to work at the same time.  

Another voice here for the option for a slighty thicker photo book stock and even a slightly more glossy finish. I just saw the first book printed with my photos (a friend’s wedding) and overall was very happy with the results and ordered a copy for myself. The book’s glossy cover was stunning!  And the software has been amazingly good from the start. I look forward to Vista support and to printing several books in the very near future!