Little disappointed about something with my new Macbook Pro...

Eighth Avenue

Eighth Avenue

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Iain
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Hi guys

took the plunge and bought a 13" Macbook Pro yesterday, moving to the dark side after using a PC for god knows how many years. One of the reasons I did this was because of the HUGE difference in time between uploading photos from a hard drive. on my laptop it had taken about 2 hours to upload about 3/4000 images from a hard drive whereas my friends Mac only took 26 minutes.

However, I plugged my camera in for the first time tonight (via USB) and tried uploading images from it via iPhoto and was disappointed with the speed as it didn't seem any faster than my basic laptop. I'm using iPhoto as I have yet to put any other software on it yet.

So... question is, can it be much faster with other software such as Aperture or even with a card reader? Hope so :(

(loving the Mac otherwise and even only after using it for a day and a half I can see why so many people recommend them)
 
I download to iphoto but not direct from the camera. Get youself a CF card reading and download from the card. You'll notice one hell of a difference in speed.
 
Have you run the software update?

There was a raw update a week or so ago. P.S mine is lightning fast into iphoto and lightroom.
 
The thing here is that it depends MOSTLY on your card, since it's much slower than the speed your macbook pro or your desktop support.

Let's say, your desktop can do 30MB/s, and your Macbook pro can do 80MB/s, but your card only do 6MB/s, the overall result would be 6MB/s.

But in the first case, your external HDD can do, let's say 80MB/s, obviously the results will be 30MB/s for your desktop and 80 for your MBP.


The external card reader may help, since transferring directly from the camera may slower the speed of your card, but it wouldn't exceed what your card can achieve (6MB/s), so, it wouldn't be any difference between your desktop and your mac.
 
I imported my first batch into the new mac today, Sandisk Extreme 4 card loaded with 5DmkII Raws in the Sandisk Image Mate reader, was no quicker doing the import than my other laptop.

Lightroom itself is miles faster.
 
Hey Iain, congrats on your purchase, but I'm going to have to mirror what everyone else has said.

Get a card reader. Downloading from your camera is a long process.
I have an internal memory card reader on my bog standard mesh computer and it downloads an 8gb memory card (Sandisk Ultra 2 8gb) full to the brim of 10-13mb raw images in about half an hour.
 
foodpoison said:
Hey Iain, congrats on your purchase, but I'm going to have to mirror what everyone else has said.

Get a card reader. Downloading from your camera is a long process.
I have an internal memory card reader on my bog standard mesh computer and it downloads an 8gb memory card (Sandisk Ultra 2 8gb) full to the brim of 10-13mb raw images in about half an hour.
Click to expand...

Thats a life time.

My raw files transfer far quicker than that. Perhaps because I mainly transfer to lightroom. I also use a cable connected straight to the camera.
 
The bottleneck is going to be the USB interface.However fast your computer is if the data can only move at a specific rate then no matter haw fast your machine is or how many cores you are using the USB/Card is going to be the controlling factor.

A firewire 800 card reader may speed things up but probably only if the card can deliver the data a ( Lexar do one ) but unless you are using the faster uDMA cards then you won't see much of an improvement. In fact Lexar only show a 10% speed increase with Firewire compared to USB2.so the cost/time benefit may not be worth it. I didn't think so.

If you are using Lightroom you will probably see an improvement as the thumbnail rendering will be a lot quicker with your new computer.

Enjoy!!
 
Are you backing up the images as they upload?

I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and say use a decent card reader - something like the SanDisk Image Mate. I upload approx 1,500 raw images from a 1DMkII (Probably half the size of the 5DII images) but it's so quick - about 2 mins per card (400 images) in my 13" MBP but then goes up to 15+ mins per card when backing up to my network hard disk through Time Capsule (all done through Lightroom).

DB
 
I try to avoid loading them into iPhoto if I'm honest. You don't really need it (just copy the images into a folder) as I am guessing if you want to preview the images you can simply do this by highlighting all the images, hold ctrl and click and choose preview.

Card readers are handy, though. Or you can plug your SD card into the SD slot on the side!
 
foodpoison said:
I have an internal memory card reader on my bog standard mesh computer and it downloads an 8gb memory card (Sandisk Ultra 2 8gb) full to the brim of 10-13mb raw images in about half an hour.
Click to expand...
:gag:

Peter_Hartland said:
If you want speed then go 800 FireWire my card reader is a lot faster than my USB
Click to expand...
Yep, if you MBP has firewire, get a firewire reader. Using the Sandisk one it takes me 20 seconds to copy 1.12gig of data to my 15" MBP (just tested it to give you an idea).

EDIT: Using the newer Sandisk EXTREME cards rated at 60mb/s
 
Everybody telling this lad to buy a card reader does realise that his MacBook pro has one built in?
 
Soda Farl said:
Everybody telling this lad to buy a card reader does realise that his MacBook pro has one built in?
Click to expand...

SD cards only. 5D is CF IIRC.

Was your mates camera a Nikon by any chance? I believe that Canon and Nikon use a different trasfer protocol when you connect the camera directly via USB, with Canons version being much slower.

It's certainly much faster using a card reader than it is uploading straight from my 450D.
 
I agree use a card reader it's much quicker, also make sure that you are using high speed cards :)
 
Did it download the raw files to your computer then ? Or convert them to jpg ? Just from the wording of your previous post it implies it never downloaded the raws at all ? May just be me being thick though, not the first time and certainly wont be the last ;)
 
Eighth Avenue said:
Sorry, I've had a proper look now. On the iPhoto screen it says 'raw' at the bottom of every photo but when I transfer them into a folder the name of all the files is .jpg
Click to expand...

I you drag a raw from iphoto to a folder it will convert to jpg. Plus you will have two copies of the photo. Right click and choose show in finder to see the original
 
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