How capable is the M2 MBA at managing a large Photos library?

[GooseInTheCaboose]

I have a big Photos library (310GB, 65,000 photos, 700 short videos) that is only growing as I take more macro/wildlife pics with my camera, and shoot more video as I recently got a GoPro that shoots 5.3K and a drone that shoots 4k.

I'm considering getting the M2 MBA with 2TB SSD, 24GB RAM and the 8/10 CPU/GPU configuration.

Will that MBA be strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?

What about when I shorten/stitch together those 5k videos, or focus stack macro photos? And what about doing all that stuff while keeping dozens and dozens of tabs open, along with large PDFs, word docs, etc in the background? How about all of that while connected to the 5k Apple Studio Display?

Should I upgrade to the 14" MBP for this kind of activity, or will the MBA do this well?

 

[fisherking]

altho i would think you'd be alright... how can anyone actually answer this? since none of us (yet) has the M2 air.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

I have a big Photos library (310GB, 65,000 photos, 700 short videos) that is only growing as I take more macro/wildlife pics with my camera, and shoot more video as I recently got a GoPro that shoots 5.3K and a drone that shoots 4k.

I'm considering getting the M2 MBA with 2TB SSD, 24GB RAM and the 8/10 CPU/GPU configuration.

Will that MBA be strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?

What about when I shorten/stitch together those 5k videos, or focus stack macro photos? And what about doing all that stuff while keeping dozens and dozens of tabs open, along with large PDFs, word docs, etc in the background? How about all of that while connected to the 5k Apple Studio Display?

Should I upgrade to the 14" MBP for this kind of activity, or will the MBA do this well?

Sounds like a huge waste of money if you’re trying to buy a fully maxed out MBA

 

[Dealmans]

I have a big Photos library (310GB, 65,000 photos, 700 short videos) that is only growing as I take more macro/wildlife pics with my camera, and shoot more video as I recently got a GoPro that shoots 5.3K and a drone that shoots 4k.

I'm considering getting the M2 MBA with 2TB SSD, 24GB RAM and the 8/10 CPU/GPU configuration.

Will that MBA be strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?

What about when I shorten/stitch together those 5k videos, or focus stack macro photos? And what about doing all that stuff while keeping dozens and dozens of tabs open, along with large PDFs, word docs, etc in the background? How about all of that while connected to the 5k Apple Studio Display?

Should I upgrade to the 14" MBP for this kind of activity, or will the MBA do this well?

Get the 14" pro, the screen is much better/bigger, more powerful, and for scrolling pro motion is so good worth it alone.
No brainer for you lol. Get a apple refurb or look for sales, I got 20% off a 16/1Tb.

 

[HDFan]

See https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-for-photographers.2347707/page-2

 

[Isamilis]

I have a big Photos library (310GB, 65,000 photos, 700 short videos) that is only growing as I take more macro/wildlife pics with my camera, and shoot more video as I recently got a GoPro that shoots 5.3K and a drone that shoots 4k.

I'm considering getting the M2 MBA with 2TB SSD, 24GB RAM and the 8/10 CPU/GPU configuration.

Will that MBA be strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?

What about when I shorten/stitch together those 5k videos, or focus stack macro photos? And what about doing all that stuff while keeping dozens and dozens of tabs open, along with large PDFs, word docs, etc in the background? How about all of that while connected to the 5k Apple Studio Display?

Should I upgrade to the 14" MBP for this kind of activity, or will the MBA do this well?

Just an idea for better guess. What machine do you currently use to manage that large library? You can compare its performance with M2 MBA - it was in WWDC presentation. If it's 2-3x faster than the current machine, then it should be fine.

 

[GooseInTheCaboose]

Just an idea for better guess. What machine do you currently use to manage that large library? You can compare its performance with M2 MBA - it was in WWDC presentation. If it's 2-3x faster than the current machine, then it should be fine.

Well, I use a 2014 mbp 15” with dgpu, quad core, with 16gb ram and 1tb ssd. But the thing is it struggles when lots of tabs are open…not sure if it is the tabs or the library that is the more difficult strain. Honestly it seems to have more trouble with all the tabs

 

[jav6454]

I have a big Photos library (310GB, 65,000 photos, 700 short videos) that is only growing as I take more macro/wildlife pics with my camera, and shoot more video as I recently got a GoPro that shoots 5.3K and a drone that shoots 4k.

I'm considering getting the M2 MBA with 2TB SSD, 24GB RAM and the 8/10 CPU/GPU configuration.

Will that MBA be strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?

What about when I shorten/stitch together those 5k videos, or focus stack macro photos? And what about doing all that stuff while keeping dozens and dozens of tabs open, along with large PDFs, word docs, etc in the background? How about all of that while connected to the 5k Apple Studio Display?

Should I upgrade to the 14" MBP for this kind of activity, or will the MBA do this well?

For the amount of money you are throwing at this, buy into the 14" MBP.

 

[Tagbert]

I have a big Photos library (310GB, 65,000 photos, 700 short videos) that is only growing as I take more macro/wildlife pics with my camera, and shoot more video as I recently got a GoPro that shoots 5.3K and a drone that shoots 4k.

I'm considering getting the M2 MBA with 2TB SSD, 24GB RAM and the 8/10 CPU/GPU configuration.

Will that MBA be strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?

What about when I shorten/stitch together those 5k videos, or focus stack macro photos? And what about doing all that stuff while keeping dozens and dozens of tabs open, along with large PDFs, word docs, etc in the background? How about all of that while connected to the 5k Apple Studio Display?

Should I upgrade to the 14" MBP for this kind of activity, or will the MBA do this well?

I have 115K photos/videos in a 384GB library on an M1 MBA with 16GB / 1 TB and it works just great. Have not had any sluggishness. I have Photos open right now with Safari and about 2 dozen tabs (mail.google.com is using 3GB, time for a browser restart) and Music. Memory is about 14GB used. I just closed the browser and the used memory went dowen to 10GB. I really depends on which sites you have loaded, more than number of tabs.

I don’t do any video stitching. It might take a few minutes but I have not basis for an estimate. My next one will probably be a 2TB, just because, though I have 500GB free right now. I do have about 300GB of secondary files like DVD rips and local music files on an external SSD. Would be nice not to have to disconnect that when I move it.

 

[Howard2k]

Apple Photos?

I have a 32,000 photo library which I was administering through Lightroom on my 2015 MBPro 13" and stored on a NAS drive. Lightroom actually does a cached version of the photos to speed up the scrolling process. Editing directly over the network wasn't fast, but I would import to a local on disk library and then when my editing was done I would shift them over to the NAS. That was the biggest slowdown - opening uncached files over the network drive.

The M2 is many times more capable than a 2015 13" Pro. Night and day.

I just migrated to an M1 and with Lightroom's caching is obviously just as good, or better (I also upgraded to the newest LR, I was holding out with LR6.x).

When I am browsing my library for local files that I have not looked at in some time there's a very slight delay while it builds/loads/caches the preview. For local files that I HAVE looked at recently it's actually just showing me the cached preview, which is a smaller version of the image. That's super fast for local files. Over the network that's finding the locally cached preview and showing me that, or building the preview if there is no local cache. That takes a little longer.


In short - for local storage I don't foresee you having any problems whatsoever, unless Apple Photos is somehow spectacularly bad at preview management.

Again, using Lightroom with a cache then 30,000 images was no problem even on my old Pro. The M1 slays it. The M2 is a further upgrade.

 

[Chancha]

Photos behaves differently than LR in many respects, but mainly when running on less capable Macs, Photos is much more forgiving. I have almost not heard of Photos users asking for which Mac to upgrade to, but frequently see the question from LR users.

That said I agree with the above posters, if one were to drop that budget you may as well go straight to the 14". Even the base with binned SoC is gonna be more useful performance wise, not to mention the screen which helps photo and video grading. A decked out M2 Air only makes sense when portability is a top priority.

 

[Jack Neill]

Get the 14" pro, the screen is much better/bigger, more powerful, and for scrolling pro motion is so good worth it alone.
No brainer for you lol. Get a apple refurb or look for sales, I got 20% off a 16/1Tb.

I would agree in some scenarios this is a valid argument, however, OP stated the want of 24/2Tb. A maxed Air is 2500 and a 16/2TB 14" is 2900. That 400$ trade off with 8Gb less ram might make more sense to some but not everyone.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

I'm running an 800 GB Photos library on a Late 2013 iMac with a 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 and 16 GB RAM. It used to have a Fusion Drive, but now it's running on HDD-only (why pay to replace the SSD in a machine this old?). I can't say anything I do with it runs well, but Photos runs no worse than anything else. So to me the question posed here seems ludicrous. Of course, M1 or M2, 13-inch or 14-inch, MBA or MBP, 8/16/24 GB RAM... any of those is going to be far and away more capable than any 8-year-old laptop.

You're not talking about a pro photo/video editing app with minimum configuration requirements that are higher than an entry-level computer. You're talking about Photos, which is designed to run well on any Mac.

Will the system be, "...strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?" The size of the library is not material - most of that space is dedicated to the full-size images, and the only time full-size images load is when you are actively viewing/working on them - one at a time. When scrolling through the library or organizing albums it is loading just the lower-res preview images. The vast, vast majority of the library's contents are not touched by those processes. Organizing contents simply updates database records. So just discard any notion that library size has any bearing on system performance, so long as there's enough SSD space to hold it. Do you actually need 2 TB when your current library is 300 GB? If you have the guts to actually hit "Delete" on the worst/most useless outtakes of a shoot, who knows how long it will take to fill 2 TB? Of course, video professionals are going to accumulate far more than 2 TB, but they don't keep all their years of work on an internal HD, they have strategies for storing old projects elsewhere.

Trimming/stitching together 5K videos? In Photos? Trimming, yes, "stitching together?" What video editor are you using? There are certainly resource-heavy tasks in photo and video editing, but you haven't named any that you are using. Well, other than focus-stacking of stills.

Overall, a lot of us over-estimate the demands we place on our computers. We impress ourselves with the supposed sophistication of the way we work or play with our machines and think that only the biggest, fastest, most over-spec'ed hardware will do. In reality, many of us barely scratch the surface of what our machines could be capable of. Open and learn how to interpret the information provided by Activity Monitor. Then do your work/play, watch the CPU Load and Memory Pressure graphs, and see just how hard your system is really working.

By all means, buy as much new Mac as you can afford. Bigger is always better. Why transport a week's worth of groceries in a subcompact when you can carry them around in a full-size SUV?

 

[Jack Neill]

(why pay to replace the SSD in a machine this old?)

Because spinners suck and SSDs make a huge difference. My quad 2013 booting from an nvme via TB is significantly faster than the internal platter pos.

 

[GooseInTheCaboose]

I'm running an 800 GB Photos library on a Late 2013 iMac with a 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 and 16 GB RAM. It used to have a Fusion Drive, but now it's running on HDD-only (why pay to replace the SSD in a machine this old?). I can't say anything I do with it runs well, but Photos runs no worse than anything else. So to me the question posed here seems ludicrous. Of course, M1 or M2, 13-inch or 14-inch, MBA or MBP, 8/16/24 GB RAM... any of those is going to be far and away more capable than any 8-year-old laptop.

You're not talking about a pro photo/video editing app with minimum configuration requirements that are higher than an entry-level computer. You're talking about Photos, which is designed to run well on any Mac.

Will the system be, "...strained when I organize and scroll through/enjoy my oversized Apple Photos library?" The size of the library is not material - most of that space is dedicated to the full-size images, and the only time full-size images load is when you are actively viewing/working on them - one at a time. When scrolling through the library or organizing albums it is loading just the lower-res preview images. The vast, vast majority of the library's contents are not touched by those processes. Organizing contents simply updates database records. So just discard any notion that library size has any bearing on system performance, so long as there's enough SSD space to hold it. Do you actually need 2 TB when your current library is 300 GB? If you have the guts to actually hit "Delete" on the worst/most useless outtakes of a shoot, who knows how long it will take to fill 2 TB? Of course, video professionals are going to accumulate far more than 2 TB, but they don't keep all their years of work on an internal HD, they have strategies for storing old projects elsewhere.

Trimming/stitching together 5K videos? In Photos? Trimming, yes, "stitching together?" What video editor are you using? There are certainly resource-heavy tasks in photo and video editing, but you haven't named any that you are using. Well, other than focus-stacking of stills.

Overall, a lot of us over-estimate the demands we place on our computers. We impress ourselves with the supposed sophistication of the way we work or play with our machines and think that only the biggest, fastest, most over-spec'ed hardware will do. In reality, many of us barely scratch the surface of what our machines could be capable of. Open and learn how to interpret the information provided by Activity Monitor. Then do your work/play, watch the CPU Load and Memory Pressure graphs, and see just how hard your system is really working.

By all means, buy as much new Mac as you can afford. Bigger is always better. Why transport a week's worth of groceries in a subcompact when you can carry them around in a full-size SUV?

Yeah ive honestly had the urge lately start computing more lightly and keep excess files on an external ssd. All my photography stuff is just a hobby, not a business, so it is not like it makes me money to buy powerful computers. I travel frequently enough that id appreciate a portable air, tho the 14” is still significantly smaller than my old 15”.

I just dont know how id organize the photos/videos on the external, photos keeps things so tidy when theyre all on the mac. The prospect of doing it, and just getting a less speccd out air is tempting. I feel like my upgrade costs going forward could be significantly cheaper, allowing me to upgrade more frequently without feeling like I have to spend 3k each time..

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Because spinners suck and SSDs make a huge difference. My quad 2013 booting from an nvme via TB is significantly faster than the internal platter pos.

Without a doubt, but how often do you boot? Nearly all my reboots are due to OS updates (mostly Catalina security update betas, since that's as high as that Mac goes). Each has our own toleration/need for speed, each has our own budget. If I'd expected to get much more than a year of additional use out of this old iMac I would likely have made a different decision. Since we now know it's not likely to be a non-Pro M-series iMac with a 27" or larger display in the foreseeable future I just have to decide whether to wait for an M2 refresh to the 24" iMac or to get the current model. Since these days I'm mostly typing and browsing on this Mac, HDD read/write speeds aren't a major handicap.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Yeah ive honestly had the urge lately start computing more lightly and keep excess files on an external ssd. All my photography stuff is just a hobby, not a business, so it is not like it makes me money to buy powerful computers. I travel frequently enough that id appreciate a portable air, tho the 14” is still significantly smaller than my old 15”.

I just dont know how id organize the photos/videos on the external, photos keeps things so tidy when theyre all on the mac. The prospect of doing it, and just getting a less speccd out air is tempting. I feel like my upgrade costs going forward could be significantly cheaper, allowing me to upgrade more frequently without feeling like I have to spend 3k each time..

One approach is to operate with multiple Photos libraries. Only one Photos library can be connected to iCloud Photos, but you could also create multiple additional libraries on external HDDs for materials you don't need to have in iCloud. It's not practical to split existing libraries (although there's a time-consuming workaround or two), but if you can organize around specific themes, have at it.

 

[HDFan]

how often do you boot?

Reboot Studio daily, saving nearly 1000 watts an hour since attached devices shutdown as well. Turning if off for 10 hours can keep me out of the 3rd and 4th electric tiers which are $.39 and $.49 per KwH, saving as much as $5 in electric bills per day.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Reboot Studio daily, saving nearly 1000 watts an hour since attached devices shutdown as well. Turning if off for 10 hours can keep me out of the 3rd and 4th electric tiers which are $.39 and $.49 per KwH, saving as much as $5 in electric bills per day.

A very different reality than mine.

I was doing pro desktop audio (long-form radio programming, CD mastering) on a Mac Quadra 950 back in the '90s. 3 outboard SCSII drives (largest was 2 GB) for audio files, a $3,000 Sony CD burner (in a rack-mountable enclosure)... If I was still in that biz... yeah, I'd either have or be wishing for a Studio and I, too, would likely shut down when I closed the door on the edit suite for the night. But as they say, that was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.