Photo editing hardware.

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Dave Williams

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Dave
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Morning, I have just purchased a A7riii and am looking at moving to the latest version of Lightroom that supports this camera. However, I'm also thinking of upgrading my 2009 iMac and this is the reason for the post as I'm after some advice or information about what people use to edit their images taken with this camera. Someone at work is selling a late 27" 2015 5k iMac so would appreciate responses from anyone who uses this set up. Other than that I would be grateful for any advice really. Thanks in advance, Dave
 
I do like osx as the iMac I've been using has been very stable. However, I'm not against looking at alternatives if it gives me more choice of performance against price.
 
Further to above I suppose what I'm after is examples of what set up people are using and their views on how well it works. I'm not a pro and don't generally takes loads of shots in one go so I don't need a machine that can handle a high volume of large files. I've also used Sigma cameras with their software so I'm used to using a system that isn't super quick.
 
If the 2015 iMac is a decent price and in good order no reason not to go for that
 
As said, if the iMac is cheap enough then it's ok, but this is already a 4 year old design with all the limitations on performance that carries.

My personal preference would be a separate computer and screen, based on higher performance hardware that can be upgraded as needed, but Apple can't provide that at a reasonable cost, so you'd need Windows.
 
Selling is asking £950 for the iMac, but the ram needs upgrading as only comes with 8gb. As a result, I’d hope to get it for less than he’s asking. Even if I don’t end up buying it this is still the rough budget i’m working on.
 
I'm running a late 2014 iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch), 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 upgraded by me from 8Gb, AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2 GB.
I run Adobe CC using Lightroom mostly and I have no problems with it's speed. I also have it on a self-built Windows 10 machine of much higher spec and I really can't see an overwhelming difference in performance.
Certainly the Win10 machine is a bit faster but not amazingly so.
 
Thanks for the reply footman. I’m not sure what an equivalent windows system would cost as that’s not what I’m after, so good to know the iMac should run without too many issues if any.
 
I’m running an A7r3 using Lightroom on a late 2012 21”. It’s not the fastest but I find it useable (sliders are a little slow to change). I have thought of upgrading but not got around to it yet. One thing to consider would be a SSD. If you are thinking of a newer iMac SSD rather than fusion drive was something I was recommended. Worth considering as whilst RAM can be upgraded in the 27” versions internal drives can’t easily be changed.

One thing to consider the latest version of lightroom that can run a A7Riii is lightroom CC. That will mean a subscription to LR CC if you don’t already have it.
 
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Thanks Rob, I did realise that and was one of things that has made me think of upgrading my current iMac. At the moment my wife also uses it and never deletes anything so both the internal and external hard drives are nearly full. I was thinking of starting with a new iMac with a lightroom subscription so I can keep by stuff separate. I could always upgrade the ram and more external drives and see how that goes I suppose.
 
Dave Williams said:
Thanks Rob, I did realise that and was one of things that has made me think of upgrading my current iMac. At the moment my wife also uses it and never deletes anything so both the internal and external hard drives are nearly full. I was thinking of starting with a new iMac with a lightroom subscription so I can keep by stuff separate. I could always upgrade the ram and more external drives and see how that goes I suppose.
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External drives is probably the easiest way to go with imac’s. I’ve managed to eek out a little more time by moving my RAWs and LR catalogue to an external drive(thunderbolt g tech pro external drive). Having everything on the internal iMac hard drive meant I’d practically filled it and performance dropped like a stone until I moved the photography stuff to the external drive.

If the 27inch 2015 is SSD and £950 that seems a good price to me even if you need to add a bit of RAM later.
 
Worth trying to get the price down of the iMac a bit but RAM shouldn’t be that much, you don’t really need anymore than 16gb. The thing with a Windows PC is you can get great specs for the cash but you’d probably need to buy a new monitor and something equivalent to the Mac retina screen would substantially eat into the budget
 
Dave Williams said:
No SSD unfortunately, just 1tb HD
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This will slow it down, I wouldn’t buy a computer with HDD these days tbh. LR and PS are pretty intensive pieces of software and will only get more so in the future.

If you want to future proof I’d suggest a decent speed i7 processor, 16GB RAM minimum, and SSD. If you’re looking at the 5k iMac you want some decent processing power and good graphics card for all those pixels.

For what it’s worth I run a 2017 MacBook Pro touchbar with 2.9ghz i7 processor (boost to 3.9ghz), 16GB RAM, 4GB Radeon Pro and 1TB SSD.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I was thinking both for external storage and external use to run the OS.
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That's how I had my iMac setup pretty easy to do and makes quite a difference to overall system speed.

Gone back to a Windows PC now though as I like tinkering too much.
 
nbaker said:
That's how I had my iMac setup pretty easy to do and makes quite a difference to overall system speed.

Gone back to a Windows PC now though as I like tinkering too much.
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What connection method are you using to keep speeds up, thunderbolt?
 
snerkler said:
What connection method are you using to keep speeds up, thunderbolt?
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When I looked into it USB3 speed wasn't that different to thunderbolt. It’s something I’ve been thinking about doing on mine a while back but did have any spare USB ports. Now I’ve changed all my externals to thunderbolt I’m only using one USB port so I could do it now.

I was thinking of getting a 250GB SSD drive as the iMac boot drive. The internal 1TB hard drive would be used for general storage with the Lightroom/photography run off a thunderbolt G Tech pro which is a lot faster than a standard spinning disk hard drive.
 
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