question about my computer for photography

Lou Frasier said:

i have a mid 2010 21.5 iMac and i want to start using it on a serious basis for doing my photography editing,it has quite a bit of stuff on it and i am wondering if i should have it completely wiped and just have all of the programs reinstalled?will this action make it more suitable for doing large raw file processing?the problem i am having with it is when i go to make a panorama in elements 9 it says that there is not enough ram but i just installed 8 mb of memory in it,am i doing something wrong or can it be my photoshop program has an issue,?thank you for any help you can provide,

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Not sure about the overall spec of your computer. I have a 2013 Macbook Pro Retina with 8GB of memory. This week I downloaded the trial version of Elements 13 and it works perfectly without issue.

RE, removing everything from your computer and then reinstall, someone with more knowledge than me will be along soon and offer advice.

Close all apps down and then try. Does it work then? Doing a clean install can help if you have a lot of stuff on your HD, but a lack of RAM will only be caused by resources running in the background.
I have 16gb of RAM in my iMac, and photo editing is the only thing that taxes the system that I do.

I would go along with the idea of closing out your apps and also checking the activity monitor to see what is going on. There are also apps like "Memory Clean" that give some indication of how RAM is being used and also the ability to clean out or "empty" RAM of junk accrued. It is a safe app to use.

As well, might want to check the best settings for your photo app. In Photoshop, there are a few settings that really help speed up some processes and that comes in handy for me.

One thing to note, I find it interesting that way back Macs were considered the systems of choice for art/graphics apps and now it seems the other way around given how many people seem to have more issues with Macs (in proportion) to the 'other' OS. Hmmm has to make one wonder.

First off I hope you mean 8GB of ram and not 8MB as that would cause problems!

Secondly you will need tolook at your performance settings. I don't use Elements but in the standard Photoshop there are various settings including memory allocation. Give it as much as you dare, keeping in mind that you need to leave some for the system and other apps. I can (slowly) manage panoramic images from 40MP Hasselblad files on my old late 2008 Macbook Pro with 6GB ram so you shouldn't have problems.

Sometimes it is worth wiping your drive and starting afresh as it removes a lot of wasted space that canbe used for virtual memory and also tidies away lots of unused preferencefiles etc.

Hi, I have a late 2009 27" iMac 3.06 Core 2 Duo. Dropped 16GB Ram in it and it works OK. Not stellar but absolutely usable.

Hope this helps.
Ken.

Obviously this is the excuse to get family and friends to get you a Retina iMac 5K with quad i7 CPU, 95 GPU, 500GB SSD, and at least 16GB of of memory. Remind them to shop for it on Black Friday.

Depending on the size of the panorama you were trying to make, it could indeed be too much for your system to handle. What size files are you working on and how many are you using for the single panorama image?

Start up Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder and let us know what is using memory and CPU. I doubt erasing your drive will help without knowing the specifics of the problem.