Why does syncing pictures take so long (even when there are no new pictures) I have about 20GB of photos (from my external hard drive) to sync with my ipod.  The first sync tooks 11 hours to copy everything over.  That makes sense to me as this is actually moving all of this data.

My issue is that now when i sync it (no new pictures added or deleted) it sits on this view



for over 20 minutes (where it say's Step 7 or 8 - Importing Photos).  Why does itunes take so long to sync my photos where there is nothing new to sync?  Shouldn't this just be some sync algorithm to easily see that nothing has changed and just move on?

Also, is there anyway to "debug" what is taking so long or workaround to try to optimize taking so long?
iTunes actually checks every file for change. That's inefficient and takes time - the only way to optimize this way of doing is either not having that amount of pictures (aka reducing the amount of files) - or putting the files into an own directory on the device and viewing them with iFile (applies to jailbroken devices) +(so that iTunes doesn't check them files..)