Apple M1 Chip

[Kirk Baker]

On my MacBook Pro 2021, I find that Photo Mechanic seems to use 20-25% of a 10-core cpu when it I am just looking at a picture, not doing anything else.  It also takes about 9Gb of memory.  This seems a bit extravagent.

You can control how much memory that Photo Mechanic uses for its memory cache.

Even when you're idle, PM is working on loading more previews and thumbnails than what you are looking at.  This won't change with a M-1 native app.

-Kirk

[aleck]

PM is working on loading more previews and thumbnails than what you are looking at.  This won't change with a M-1 native app.

Even if you don't rewrite all of PhotoMechanic 6 or 6+ to run natively on Apple Silicon right now, rewriting core routines like generating and caching previews to use native routines would radically improve performance.

I'm surprised to see CameraBits so indifferent to PhotoMechanic performance and the needs of their macOS customers. PhotoMechanic 6+ was a big investment for me.

[Kirk Baker]

Aleck,

PM is working on loading more previews and thumbnails than what you are looking at.  This won't change with a M-1 native app.

Even if you don't rewrite all of PhotoMechanic 6 or 6+ to run natively on Apple Silicon right now, rewriting core routines like generating and caching previews to use native routines would radically improve performance.

It doesn't work that way.  It is either a fully native app or it is not at all a native app.  There is no way to have some of the code/libraries/functions compiled as Arm64 code and the rest be Intel (x86_64) code.

-Kirk

[Drugstore]

Still problems on Apple M1 pro. It took PM 15-20 minutes to load 80 images of 50Mb each. It mostly only shows one image or a bunch of empty placeholders. Then PM hangs for some  minutes without showing any progress (not even the card read lamp shows action). Activity monitor shows that PM hangs. Somehow suddenly PM finishes and the yellow bar jumps from the beginning to the end and goes green (see screepdump for hanging matter). It's not usable in this state as on my previous MacBook it worked fluently.

[Kirk Baker]

Still problems on Apple M1 pro. It took PM 15-20 minutes to load 80 images of 50Mb each. It mostly only shows one image or a bunch of empty placeholders. Then PM hangs for some  minutes without showing any progress (not even the card read lamp shows action). Activity monitor shows that PM hangs. Somehow suddenly PM finishes and the yellow bar jumps from the beginning to the end and goes green (see screepdump for hanging matter). It's not usable in this state as on my previous MacBook it worked fluently.

For a problem like this, I suggest contacting our support folks at:

By email: support@camerabits.com

By phone: +1 503.547.2888

Hours: Mon-Fri, 9:00am-5:00pm [PST/PDT]

[ahoward]

Still problems on Apple M1 pro. It took PM 15-20 minutes to load 80 images of 50Mb each. It mostly only shows one image or a bunch of empty placeholders. Then PM hangs for some  minutes without showing any progress (not even the card read lamp shows action). Activity monitor shows that PM hangs. Somehow suddenly PM finishes and the yellow bar jumps from the beginning to the end and goes green (see screepdump for hanging matter). It's not usable in this state as on my previous MacBook it worked fluently.

I'll echo Kirk's suggestion to open up a ticket with us, but just wanted to add: I am fairly confident that this issue is not related to Photo Mechanic running under Rosetta.

I just did a test Ingest with a USB 3.0 card reader to an Apple USB to USB-C adapter plugged into my M1 Macbook Air, using a 30 MB/s CF card, with roughly the same amount of data as you described (3.5 GB) and it took about 3 minutes. Please get in touch by email or phone so we can look into why this is happening on your computer.