OSX 10.5.3 slows down PhotoMechanic?

[jjphoto]

Just upgraded my Mac Power PC to 10.5.3 and noticed a real slow down of contact sheet loading straight from my camera card.
I am a long time user of PhotoMechanic and am running the latest version V 4.5.3.1
Nothing else has changed, just the OSX upgrade.
My mac is running with 5.5 gig of ram but I have noticed a real slowdown.
PM works just fine but I am having to wait a lot longer for the images to load and render in the contact sheet.
I always work direct from my camera cards.
Haven't tried my Mac Book Pro (Intel) yet since the OSX upgrade.
Any ideas?

[Kirk Baker]

Just upgraded my Mac Power PC to 10.5.3 and noticed a real slow down of contact sheet loading straight from my camera card.
I am a long time user of PhotoMechanic and am running the latest version V 4.5.3.1
Nothing else has changed, just the OSX upgrade.
My mac is running with 5.5 gig of ram but I have noticed a real slowdown.
PM works just fine but I am having to wait a lot longer for the images to load and render in the contact sheet.
I always work direct from my camera cards.
Haven't tried my Mac Book Pro (Intel) yet since the OSX upgrade.

Definitely do not edit on your camera card!

Mac OS X 10.5.x adds all kinds of stuff on disks as you use them.  For example on a camera card just browsing can cause files to be indexed by Spotlight (creating database files in the process) cause file system change events to be written to the disk.  This is problematic because these operations can completely fill up a card (usually people's cards are nearly full already).

Your only copy of your photos are on your camera card until you have downloaded (Ingested) them.  Ingest first, then edit.

It is entirely possible that 10.5.3 causes even more input and output to the card than previous versions of Mac OS X 10.5.

-Kirk

[jjphoto]

Thanks for the thoughts Kirk.
Since I have been using PM (too long to remember now) I have never used the Ingest approach.
Seems like I may have to now because of what you say about OSX 10.5.3

[Ben Curtis]

Echoing what Kirk said, it's always better, safer, and normally faster to ingest first then edit from the ingested files on the hard drive.
Also, after any OS X update there are 100s/1000s of new files on the hard disk that Spotlight needs to index, resulting in a temporary system slowdown until that indexing is completed - it could just be that, and you can tell if the spotlight indicator in the very top right of the screen has a pulsating dot in the middle.
Also, assuming your camera disks all have the same name, you could try adding them to the "do not index these disks" list of disks in the Spotlight pane of the system preferences.

Rgds,

Ben

[willievass]

Something has changed for the worse with 10.5.3 and Photo Mechanic which is now glacially slow in rendering thumbnails from a mounted card. Yes in an ideal world it is always preferable to ingest and then work on a folder of images but when sending 10 pics during a quick halftime break in football you don't have that luxury. Drop the card onto the PM icon, hand off the selected images to Photoshop bang, bang, bang ... no more. Chug, chug, chug...   

As a reference it is equally slow when browsing via a USB 2.0 reader or a Sandisk Extreme Firewire 800 reader on both a Mac Pro and Macbook Pro. In fact the mac itself slows down as passing the mouse cursor along the dock shows a very slow icon animation but it is PM which really grinds when a camera disk is mounted.

Spotlight indexing is not occurring and disks are excluded from its grasp.

[Kirk Baker]

Something has changed for the worse with 10.5.3 and Photo Mechanic which is now glacially slow in rendering thumbnails from a mounted card. Yes in an ideal world it is always preferable to ingest and then work on a folder of images but when sending 10 pics during a quick halftime break in football you don't have that luxury. Drop the card onto the PM icon, hand off the selected images to Photoshop bang, bang, bang ... no more. Chug, chug, chug...   

As a reference it is equally slow when browsing via a USB 2.0 reader or a Sandisk Extreme Firewire 800 reader on both a Mac Pro and Macbook Pro. In fact the mac itself slows down as passing the mouse cursor along the dock shows a very slow icon animation but it is PM which really grinds when a camera disk is mounted.

Spotlight indexing is not occurring and disks are excluded from its grasp.

Obviously nothing has changed in how Photo Mechanic accesses the files on a camera disk (or a hard drive for that matter, the same exact code is used) so something must be going on in 10.5.3 to increase the time in which it takes to read from the card, or possibly the OS is performing some other operations that is using up the bandwidth of the card reader.

We'll have to investigate and get back to you on this.

-Kirk

[willievass]

Thanks Kirk. It's Canon CR2 RAW files on the cards I'm browsing but I doubt it makes a difference. There are a few of us all having the same slowdowns with 10.5.3

[soren steffen]

I have been ingesting both cr2 and nef files and it all goes slower in 10.5.3

Not only ingesting but opening folders is getting very much slower. No doubt it is 10.5.3 being the culprit.

[Kirk Baker]

Søren,

I have been ingesting both cr2 and nef files and it all goes slower in 10.5.3

Not only ingesting but opening folders is getting very much slower. No doubt it is 10.5.3 being the culprit.

Does the slowness feel like it is in the initial scanning for files, or does it feel like it is being spent in generating the thumbnails?

-Kirk

[Ben Curtis]

Someone else has discovered a serious bug in 10.5.3 that can lead to actual image corruption - take a look here:

http://www.helios.de/support/ti.phtml?116

Seems like it could be unrelated (this is when using AFP-based file sharing rather than camera disks), but seems more and more like 10.5.3 made some unwanted changes.

Ben

[soren steffen]

Kirk,
It appears to me it is the searching in folder on ext. drive that has slowed down. Once the searching is over thumbs pop up as fast as usual.

Søren

[Kirk Baker]

Is anyone interested in running a logging version of PM so we can find out where the extra time is being spent?

Thanks,

-Kirk

[willievass]

PM sent.

[memoriesbymichael]

Horrible speeds here too.  Took a shower and came back and still loading what used to take 2 to 3 minutes. 

[Kirk Baker]

Horrible speeds here too.  Took a shower and came back and still loading what used to take 2 to 3 minutes. 

You need to be running the 4.5.3.2 beta.  It should solve all of the speed issues caused by Mac OS X 10.5.3 and higher.  The 4.5.3.2 beta is available in the Announcements section of the forums.

-Kirk