Huge memory consumption on load

I have a rather big image database (18k+) and everytime I start Shotwell my system (not too shabby) will nearly die.
That's because everything is transferred to Swap while Shotwell is loading and until all this has unswapped the system is completely unusable.
The memory reserved during startup of Shotwell reaches 1.5GB if i remember well.

If it were a high-performance video-editor or something this might be tolerable, but it is but a photo manager.

During normal use it reserves 0.5GB of memory which isn't too good but acceptable.

Running Ubuntu 12.10, latest Shotwell 0.13.0

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: shotwell 0.13.0-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-17.28-generic 3.5.5
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 236a6ecab42f5f00606cd37059f07dc1
CheckboxSystem: 5a5f83b1a22238119772e525a902a417
Date: Sat Oct 20 21:49:35 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
SourcePackage: shotwell
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-21 (0 days ago)