Photogirlnwcoast

My Lightroom catalog is on the external drive so when I load my shoot it goes into the external hard drive. Adobe set it up that way. Not sure if I can do it your way. Good idea I can try so thanks for your offering.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

I've been doing my PP on Apple machines for just over 3 years and using Ps on PC machines prior to that. I use a MacBook Pro 2013 w/8GB and a 480 SSD for light work on-the-go and an iMac Pro at home for this work. I found that 8GB of memory was 'just enough' to use with Lr if you had a light load. 16GB is good and 32GB is better (which is what both my iMac and iMac Pro have on-board). Having only a 256GB SSD will work but it requires a careful watch on disk space if you want sufficient room for working files. As a very heavy, daily Lr user, the iMac Pro is THE machine for the job. For external drives I'd suggest you go Thunderbolt 3, or whatever the fastest level your machine supports. LaCie makes some nice 2Big systems for that. Best of luck.

conigk

I have an older iMac that had only 4 GB of RAM. I purchased 8 more from Ramjet and also moved all of my photos to an external hard drive and I got tremendous improvement in both Photoshop and Lightroom performance. My machine can take 16 GB but I am planning on upgrading soon. I will likely do the memory update myself as it is much less expensive than getting it added to my new computer by Apple.

photoshack Loc: Irvine, CA

Your macbook has thunderbolt that you can use for very fast external hard drives. If you did your memory upgrade and had a very good fast TB connected external drive, your internal hard drive should be sparse as it is used for apps and the pshop caching/temp files. Your performance with 16gb ram and nice external fast storage should be excellent. Also, having your backup solution like Crashplan back up from your thunderbolt drive is great since your libary is in one place, sync'd to cloud backup.

Like others have said, you don't need to use apple memory....

photoshack Loc: Irvine, CA

guess I shoulda read your reply first; spot on.

cambriaman Loc: Central CA Coast

My iMac27 (Retina 5K, Late 2015 model) has 32 Gb RAM and 2 Terabyte SSD. I have no issues with its ability to support image processing/editing. It is backed up to a LaCie 4 Tb drive and a La Ice 2 Tb drive.

Properframe Loc: US Virginia

Whatever you think you need - double it. RAM is cheap compared to time. SSD saves time. Faster processor saves time. RAM saves time.

hassighedgehog Loc: Corona, CA

I'm running PSE 15 on an I7 with 8gb RAM which runs fine. If you can upgrade the RAM that will help. As others have suggested swapping your hard drive for an SSD will also help. Not sure how current your operating system is. What you may really need is a more current computer. Depends on how much you can upgrade and if it is worth it in comparison to upgrading the whole thing.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

While one can never have enough ram for editing, 8GB of ram is quite good. I'm in a situation, were I have to work with a computer that has less than 1GB of ram and I still work on pictures, including focus stacking and many other tasks, running PS CC. It certainly is very slow, but it still gets it done!

jwohlhueter

I agree with this response and would upgrade your memory to what you can afford. I also suggest, as a simple test, try connecting your external drive(s) after booting up your computer. I have two, sometimes three externals connected and my system runs noticeably faster if they are connected after the computer is booted up.

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

No

sv3noKin51E

Photogirl, was in the computer business for a few decades, and always recommended to all customers if they rendering video, worked with PS or it's cousin programs for photographic work, or for musical recording and production, it's always preferable to buy and upgrade to as much RAM as one can afford, and the machine can handle. Memory and motherboard specifications are more important than the brand name for PCs. For Apple as long as it's compatible with Apple, the machine doesn't care if it's new or pre-owned and there's a very large market in guaranteed pre-owned memory. With any computer, be sure to invest in an un-interrruptible power supply with enough battery backup run time that if you have a surge/brownout or blackout, your machine, all of your HDD's, programs and work can be saved/exited and shut down. We run several programs simultaneously for photo/video and music work, and as the main workstation is always offline, there's no internet security, AV or malware to worry about slowing the machine down. When a computer doesn't have to be online, it can be tweaked and processing is never held back. Not everyone can run offline. Also, whether it's your laptop or a desktop, consider picking up a good APC UPS battery backup for the holidays. We get a new one every so often and and depending on how much depends on it in the way of RAM, drives, software and work, a $130 UPS can literally save your day in a millisecond, even from line noise. After working on photos for hours, it's terrible to lose any work or equipment because of power issues.

Last year, we went from 16 to 32 GBs on the offline computer, about $130 from Amazon with a lifetime warranty (RAM seldom goes bad). 16 extra GBs made so much difference, there's no reason why not to do upgrade if you can . Not all laptops can manage over 16 GBs of RAM (their are some that can, but that's in addition to the internal SSD). Laptop memory is always more expensive than desktops. Every time you can double what you have, it's breathtaking; 8 Gbs is always better than 4. If your machine can take two 8 GB slots, fill them up. With an i5 or i7, that's a very nice upgrade. Desktops and workstations generally have better spec'd aftermarket motherboards available. Mac Pro hardware isn't anything to put down. The majority of James Bond films prior to Dan Craig were mastered and converted on farms of old Macs; can't imagine what all those ancient Macs cost in those days, and the rendering took a very long time compared to what can be done now. Good luck. sv

blackest Loc: Ireland

Everymac is a great site you can identify your mac several ways including its serial number when you have identified it see what the max ram is often apple said 8 but then other world computing or flex have ram upgrade kits that will allow 16GB my mid 2010 has 16GB now as does my 2011 i7 mac according to apple they both max out at 8GB. I tend to find when processing photos around 10GB is in use.

For a longtime i always used Yosemite but have recently been trying later versions of OSX and the best version seems to be Sierra for maximum compatibility, Nik collection has to change the settings on each plugin not to create a separate layer in High Sierra. Seems Sierra is compatible with the newest software and the old. I also found several other apps were dead on high sierra (logic pro, final cut ....)

SSD works well i have a thunderbolt to esata adapter and run a samsung evo850 in that it is very fast for booting up (less than 5 secs) and file transfers. I'm kind of tempted to fit the SSD internally but i quite like the 2 TB drive i have fitted already :)

If you do get an SSD google osx trim enable by default apple has it turned off for third party drives and having it enabled will keep the SSD fast.

mojave can be patched to run on older macs at some cost to performance. on my 15" mac pro the integrated graphics card has to be used and the external disabled. Google Mojave patcher. You can also find a patcher for Sierra and High Sierra. If you do decide to install High Sierra on an SSD by default it will format the drive to apple file system instead of hfs+ , this makes the drive unreadable to older versions of OSX but there is a terminal command line switch for the installer which will allow you to use hfs+ instead.

hope some of these titbits are useful.

rothphotog Loc: Orlando, FL

I agree, and highly recommend OWC.com (Other World Computing) also known as www.macsales.com. I recently maxed out the RAM on a 2014 MacBook Pro and a 2015 27-inch iMac. Made an amazing world of difference in their operation. No need at all to have a Mac tech perform the upgrade. It's a super-easy plug-and-play operation. The macsales website has handy charts that show which macs can be upgraded with various amounts of RAM and videos that will walk you through the entire process.

sv3noKin51E

rothphotos; OWC is who we send people to; their used Mac gear is top shelf. sv