Have just checked and PM is copying across 305MB from a card in 40secs and finder is taking around 20 secs to copy the pictures is this normal that PM takes longer than finder?
this is a lot quicker than yesterday don't know why as I had done a restart yesterday and it was the same taking along time to copy the pictures
Photo Mechanic should always be slower than the Finder, but the difference shouldn't be dramatic on full cards. Photo Mechanic parses each file for its EXIF data, Maker Notes, etc. which the Finder does not do at all. Photo Mechanic also scans the directories to pair up RAW and JPEG files so that they're worked on together, and the Finder does not.
The overhead is significant but has less impact on larger, full cards. For instance on a 4GB card that is full, the Finder will copy it in 1:15. Photo Mechanic will copy that same data in 1:38. These timings are on my Mac OS X system with a Firewire 800 Sandisk CF card reader and a 300x Lexar 4GB card.
I have heard several reports of people experiencing slowness for a period of time and that when they reboot some time later the slowness is gone. Sounds like bugs in Snow Leopard to me. Since I cannot reproduce the problems myself and file a reproducible case, I have not filed a bug on this issue with Apple. I have filed several others by the way.
Even though we have this new updated version that attempts to workaround the worst issues in Snow Leopard, I still suggest that if you're running an earlier version of Mac OS X, now is
not the time to upgrade to Snow Leopard.
-Kirk
