MacBook Air for digital photography?

[toaster_oven]

I’m looking to purchase a laptop to use to review photos and some video when I’m away from my main computer. I am planning on carrying around an external SSD in my camera case to back up photos So I think i wouldn’t need a ton of storage space on the computer - however i think 256GB is not enough for moving things around. does anyone else have this set up? How much HD space do you feel is adequate for this work?

I’m mostly a hobby photographer, so I don’t need anything too fancy.

 

[Any name]

it depends on your ambitions. A Sony .arw raw file is 50 MB IIRC.

External SSD are getting cheaper. You might want one of those for your collection as well as a backup drive.

 

[ovbacon]

I’m looking to purchase a laptop to use to review photos and some video when I’m away from my main computer. I am planning on carrying around an external SSD in my camera case to back up photos So I think i wouldn’t need a ton of storage space on the computer - however i think 256GB is not enough for moving things around. does anyone else have this set up? How much HD space do you feel is adequate for this work?

I’m mostly a hobby photographer, so I don’t need anything too fancy.

If you are going to use an external ssd for your photos than why would a 256GB internal not be enough?
I have a mini that has 512GB but all my photo/video stuff is on a external ssd and I am not even using 200GB of the internal.... and this is my main computer that has all my editing software on it.

 

[Toutou]

however i think 256GB is not enough for moving things around

Are you going to need to store more than ~100 GB of photos on the machine itself? If not, I can’t see why you couldn’t fit on a 256 GB drive. When you’re moving photos from your camera to an external drive, they don’t go onto the internal SSD first, so that doesn’t matter at all.

 

[Alameda]

If you are going to use an external ssd for your photos than why would a 256GB internal not be enough?
I have a mini that has 512GB but all my photo/video stuff is on a external ssd and I am not even using 200GB of the internal.... and this is my main computer that has all my editing software on it.

Because the internal drive will be noticeably faster, so it's better to do culling and editing from files stored on the internal drive and then move everything to external storage. So, unfortunately, 512 GB SSD would be better and around 5 TB external, for the archive, is desirable. But the 5 TB doesn't need to be the portable drive you carry with you; it's best if that's a NAS at home.

Of course, it depends a lot on your camera and how many photos you shoot at once, and how much video content you'll create. 4K video eats storage very fast. For me, I often shoot 25 to 60 GB before copying the card to laptop.

 

[jz0309]

I’m looking to purchase a laptop to use to review photos and some video when I’m away from my main computer. I am planning on carrying around an external SSD in my camera case to back up photos So I think i wouldn’t need a ton of storage space on the computer - however i think 256GB is not enough for moving things around. does anyone else have this set up? How much HD space do you feel is adequate for this work?

I’m mostly a hobby photographer, so I don’t need anything too fancy.

For those exact reasons I got a M1 MBA 2 years ago with 16GB RAM and 512 SSD. I use LR and PS and it’s working well for me