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iMac powerful enough for photo editing?
- Thread starter SLR2009
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A Mac mini will be powerful enough for you!!
I edit HD video on my Mac mini (using iMovie) and it's fine with it - so basic editing of stills will be a breeze for any iMac.
Sure an iMac would be good enough, but are you sure you want to use iPhoto?
I have about 35'000 pictures, spread out over 175 events, all residing on my NAS. This works fine, I do not copy photos to iPhoto folder when I import, and I have the iPhoto folder on the network as well, and access via an alias. This way all my Macs can use the same iPhoto folder, and I only need to import photos once.
However, it is SSLLOOWW. I mean, I can access the photos, and I can scroll down to the event I want to see, but it can take seconds. Especially if the event has a few hundred pictures in it.
Just my 5 cents...
KB
I have about 35'000 pictures, spread out over 175 events, all residing on my NAS. This works fine, I do not copy photos to iPhoto folder when I import, and I have the iPhoto folder on the network as well, and access via an alias. This way all my Macs can use the same iPhoto folder, and I only need to import photos once.
However, it is SSLLOOWW. I mean, I can access the photos, and I can scroll down to the event I want to see, but it can take seconds. Especially if the event has a few hundred pictures in it.
Just my 5 cents...
KB
iMac would be fine. If you need external storage, use firewire 800 or high speed storage with real gigabit ethernet.
That means your NAS is slow.
Even with gigabit ethernet, NAS are essentially small computers with underpowered CPU.
You need gigabit ethernet and possibly RAID to make that work.
That means your NAS is slow.
Even with gigabit ethernet, NAS are essentially small computers with underpowered CPU.
You need gigabit ethernet and possibly RAID to make that work.
hmmmm
My NAS, the Infrant NV+, was last year rated the fastest NAS for home usage. It is 4x1TB HDs, in XRaid (basically Raid5), and the connection is Gigabit.
I am pulling around 23Mb/s, and I can stream several BR films, music, and files, concurrently, without any loss of streaming quality. Right now my daughter is watching an AVI via our Media Player (EVA8K), my wife is listening to iTunes on her MA (mostly FLACs), and I am working on iPhoto. I don't think it is the NV+ which is the bottleneck here. Also, this has only gotten worse since I upgraded to iPhoto 8.0.1.
KB
My NAS, the Infrant NV+, was last year rated the fastest NAS for home usage. It is 4x1TB HDs, in XRaid (basically Raid5), and the connection is Gigabit.
I am pulling around 23Mb/s, and I can stream several BR films, music, and files, concurrently, without any loss of streaming quality. Right now my daughter is watching an AVI via our Media Player (EVA8K), my wife is listening to iTunes on her MA (mostly FLACs), and I am working on iPhoto. I don't think it is the NV+ which is the bottleneck here. Also, this has only gotten worse since I upgraded to iPhoto 8.0.1.
KB
23Mb/s (or even 23MB/s which is what I think you meant) is really slow for a RAID.
Firewire 800 gives close to 80MB/s performance for a single modern drives.
As I said, NAS are typically under powered for file transfers.
+1
Something like iPhoto is going to be requesting a LOT of random access of the data, lots of reads & writes in quick succession.
Streaming media in a steady flow is a lot easier to process which is why it's fine as a media server.
Anything requiring fast, random access should be kept as local to the client machine as possible, i.e. on the SATA bus internally, or via FW as a second best option. USB follows, with network storage as last resort where the host machine needs to share its CPU resources with others - and if the CPU and RAM is slow, there's your bottleneck.
Something like iPhoto is going to be requesting a LOT of random access of the data, lots of reads & writes in quick succession.
Streaming media in a steady flow is a lot easier to process which is why it's fine as a media server.
Anything requiring fast, random access should be kept as local to the client machine as possible, i.e. on the SATA bus internally, or via FW as a second best option. USB follows, with network storage as last resort where the host machine needs to share its CPU resources with others - and if the CPU and RAM is slow, there's your bottleneck.
Wooooow slow down there! I think you are mixing up the discussion about NAS using iPhoto and using iPhoto on an iMac. The comment above yours (if I understood correctly) was about why an NAS is no good for a program like iPhoto. The NAS is transferring at 23MB/s... which is slower than the 5 year old stock 80GB HD in my G5 (reads at least 40MB/s and it's about 70% full).
Adobe Lightroom is pretty good for editing and organizing large amounts of photos. Even a mac mini will run everything you need.
First; I totally agree, an iMac would be very well suited for photo editing. Of course, if you can afford a Mac Pro, go for it. You will not regret it. And the bigger the better, but remember to factor in the price of a decent monitor
Second; I do think you can reliably run iPhoto from a NAS. As I said it only got markably worse when I upgraded to v. 8.0.1. Also, I just did a complete re-import of all my photos, and that helped tremendously. Before I had just updated iPhoto, and it was really slow, but now it is better, just not great.
SLR2009 wants to put 100'000 photos into iPhoto, and no I do not think iPhoto was ever envisioned to be a professional photo organiser. This is evident in a few areas; there is no way to share the iPhoto library, it doesn't deal with import of different photos from the same folder twice very well. Basically there are better organisers out there, and Lightroom is one of them.
KB
Second; I do think you can reliably run iPhoto from a NAS. As I said it only got markably worse when I upgraded to v. 8.0.1. Also, I just did a complete re-import of all my photos, and that helped tremendously. Before I had just updated iPhoto, and it was really slow, but now it is better, just not great.
SLR2009 wants to put 100'000 photos into iPhoto, and no I do not think iPhoto was ever envisioned to be a professional photo organiser. This is evident in a few areas; there is no way to share the iPhoto library, it doesn't deal with import of different photos from the same folder twice very well. Basically there are better organisers out there, and Lightroom is one of them.
KB
My wife who is a wedding photographer uses a 24" iMac for her main editing machine and it is just fine. As others have mentioned I think iPhoto is going to be your main slowdown with really large libraries.
On the NAS issue, I have a ReadyNAS 600 and NV+. I primarily use them for storage of already edited photos they are plenty fast when I have to browse my archives using Photo Mechanic. They only feel a little slower than when pulling off an Xserve at work. (The real-world data throughput is MUCH higher on the Xserve of course but the price/performance ratio is very good on the NAS.) Netgear has a newer ReadyNAS Pro on the market now that uses a Core 2 Duo chip and is much faster than the older models.
On the NAS issue, I have a ReadyNAS 600 and NV+. I primarily use them for storage of already edited photos they are plenty fast when I have to browse my archives using Photo Mechanic. They only feel a little slower than when pulling off an Xserve at work. (The real-world data throughput is MUCH higher on the Xserve of course but the price/performance ratio is very good on the NAS.) Netgear has a newer ReadyNAS Pro on the market now that uses a Core 2 Duo chip and is much faster than the older models.