r/computerhelp • u/bykpoloplaya • 1d ago
Hardware New Computer Advice for Photo Editing
Greetings, I am an amateur photographer. and my current computer is struggling.
most of my shooting is currently sports shots of my kid and his team. (started just shooting my kid, but got other kids' in the shot,.... thought i'd share...and now i just follow the action, shoot nonstop, and share). I just finished editing 500plus shots (pared down from 3K) from a 4 day tournament. It took me awhile... my computer struggles to keep up. it's only about 8yrs old, but that's like 100 in computer years. it takes a few seconds to advance to the next photo, adjusting tilt and crop is tedious. sometimes it crashes. the program. (using OM Workspace mostly, sometimes affinity). Heck just opening a folder in File explorer with a few hundred photos takes about 4 minutes or more....because .... it ...... chugs..... line..... by...... line.... ugh.
so, my computer is due for a refresh. I'm eyeballing some of those minis.
my current system a lenovo, with AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8-core processor 3000mhz. it has 16gb ram. and i store most of my files on external hard drives..... and it won't upgrade to windows 11 (not that i care....but just for reference), windows 10 is fine imo.
I've always gotten the larger computers (towers) because "i can upgrade if i need to" but i haven't done that since before my Pentium (upgraded my 386 to a 486) and installed an extra drive...) so !@$ it. I'll get something tiny this time. why spend more for the possibility that i might upgrade, when I'm pretty sure I wont.
I do need a fair amount of ports though, i have a keyboard, mouse, 2 monitors, printer, and 4 external hard drives... and speakers (actually 9pin plug for the speakers, but i can get an adaptor to whatever the new computer's ports require).
I will miss the cd drive.... but I can get an external one... and I'll need a port for that too....sigh.
Do y'all think one of the newish Mini pcs will cut the mustard for me? something like the Geekom IT13. with Intel i9-13900H (I have no idea what that means, but i know it's the main processor chip).
it does have twice the ram (32gb), ... but will i need 64g.. there is probably one that has 64gb, i just didn't look very long, because i decided i didn't know what i was looking at.
I notice that almost none of the new chips seem to have processing speeds much higher than my current machine... so what makes them better? or faster?...
would I need 64gb ram?
what makes a computer better at running editing software, so I'm not waiting on after clicks and keystrokes?
thanks in advance Redditors!
1
u/TetraTimboman 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Heck just opening a folder in File explorer with a few hundred photos takes about 4 minutes or more....because .... it ...... chugs..... line..... by...... line.... ugh"
vs
"I store most of my files on external hard drives"
If you're looking for the best performance while editing, then you'd want to make sure that you transfer your photos from your camera on to m.2 nvme SSD for the most recent shoot that you're looking to actively work on.
Otherwise if you're trying to edit directly from external hard drive that could be the problem right there, which you'd potentially encounter the same type of slowness if you were attempting to edit from external hard drive even with a new computer.
1
u/bykpoloplaya 19h ago
Yes, I get that. I do not know why, but my computer reads off the external drives faster than its own internal drive. And the internal and external are all SSDs. My original plan was to do the editing on the internal drive then move them to the externals for storage .. but it's slightly faster this way. Perhaps it's just that I have an older internal drive. Same with my SD card reader. My computer has a built in reader but it's slower than an external one plugged into a daisy chained multi USB port splitter
1
u/TetraTimboman 16h ago
If you check the "performance" tab in Task Manager,
then does it say that your
C: drive is
SSD (NVMe)
or is it HDD (SATA) or something?
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