Photomechanic 6

[jkm]

After two and a half years of waiting for Apple Silicon to mature and be supported better, I have finally switched to the Mac studio with the M2 Max processor.

I typically spend several hours each day going through a few thousand photos in Photo Mechanic as part of my work.

Sadly, Photo Mechanic seems very glacial when going through photos.

Could it be the Apple Silicon causing this, even though Apple Silicon has been out since fall of 2020?

I'm looking at it now and I notice in the preview window that to the left all the file names are in red color.

Does this mean that they are rendering slowly for some reason?

I have changed all the settings to what I could remember made it go faster before.

Are there any settings that need to be switched a certain way to make Photo Mechanic 6 run better on this computer?

Everything else is the same as before, but it feels like a definitely pause, almost a freeze, with each photo.

My workload is a mixture of viewing and rating each photo from 0-5.

The new computer should be at least double the single-threaded speed as my old one, and even more with multi-threaded work.

But instead it feels several times slower.

I've even waited for a few minutes with the Preview open in a folder before working to try to give PM a chance to cache some things maybe.

Still no difference.

Instead of Load, Load, Load, Load, while going through photos, it's more like (Pause) Load, (Pause) Load, (Pause) Load...

Thank you very much for any possible assistance or advice.

If this is just a sign that Apple Silicon is still in beta version, that's sad but understandable.

I probably should have waited six years like I usually do before trying new things.

[Kirk Baker]

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]

[jkm]

Thank you very much!

[jkm]

If you don't mind my asking, what does the red color of the file name mean to the left under the film strip to the left side of the Preview window as I am going through photos?


Is the red color normal now, or a sign that something is slow or wrong?

[jkm]

I emailed support. This is such a disaster. I may have to switch back to my old computer to finish my week's work on time.

Thank you very much for your help!

[Kirk Baker]

If you don't mind my asking, what does the red color of the file name mean to the left under the film strip to the left side of the Preview window as I am going through photos?


Is the red color normal now, or a sign that something is slow or wrong?

It means that the image has not loaded at the size requested by the Contact Sheet, Preview, or thumbnail strip in the Preview window.

Do you have RAW Rendering turned on?  (Preferences->Render Cache)  If so, turn that off.

-Kirk

[jkm]

Thank you very much.

This is so crazy, but after coming back to it a few more times, now it seems to be working normally.

I don't think it's faster than my old computer, at least not 4x faster like Apple claims, but it's also not noticeably slower any more.

And now the file names are white like before.

I haven't changed any settings, and RAW rendering was turned off already.

So weird.

The only thing that I did was to use brew.sh from the command line to install some open source image programs that I use for other purposes.

But I don't know why that would affect PM 6 in any way.

I guess it's working for now.

[jkm]

Thank you very much again.

[jkm]

Maybe apple was scanning PM or sending some antivirus data about it to its servers and making it go slow.

I remember well the day when Apple's servers bogged down and then we all discovered that Apple was sending data constantly from our applications to Apple to supposedly provide 'security'.

And when their servers stopped responding it became slow or even impossible to use many programs on my own computer, just because Apple's servers weren't doing their thing right.

Very scary, especially from a company like Apple that claims to care about privacy.