EM import from Iphoto

First of all, a BIG thanks to Phase one for making this product available to us, especially to those of use with older versions of C1 and backs (C1 4.8 & H20 in my case). I look forward to future products based around this. Also please don't take this question as a criticism, just as a fact finding exercise.

I successfully imported my master image library where i keep my original copies, last night in a short while. So far so good.

I tried then to create a catalog into which I wanted to import my Iphoto library, which is essentially just the same as above, but with all the keywords, subfolders, smart albums etc etc. that I photo has, and minus the really big scans from 4x5 film. I ran into the problem that importing from Iphoto (6) was taking about 4 minutes per image. This is on a dual 2GHz G5 with 6GB RAM - Not exactly cutting edge, but as it had imported the whole master library in a reasonable time, I thought that 4 minutes was exceptionally long.

So is this normal? or should I be checking out settings, and maybe doing a rebuild on Iphoto to speed it up? If it is normal, I can't see how an import from Iphoto can be successful, as my 51000 images will take 144 days non stop processing to import.

Any suggestions?