My new 27inch 32Gb iMac

Just taken the plunge and treated myself to a new iMac after a good while of struggling to even open Photoshop and Lightroom on my seven-year-old previous Mac. The difference in speed is staggering. I've got 32Gb Ram on my new 27inch Mac, as opposed to only 8Gb on my old one. Setting up the new Mac was far less difficult than I had feared it would be, and I had to install Adobe on the new one, too. No problem. The frequent updates on Adobe were a nightmare on the old Mac. This new one is frighteningly fast. To try things out I delved into my back catalogue and came up with a couple here from last year. It's an absolute pleasure to work on the new machine compared to the stuttering headaches the previous, ageing Mac gave me. I know Apple have promised a new silicon chip Mac this year, but my advice would be if you think you desperately need a new Mac, as I did, get it now. The new silicon models will be tried and untested, according to all the research I did. This new Mac is incredible, not least with its Retina 5k screen. Resolution is stunning. I am seeing my old photos as I have never seen them before.

Photo from Terrycanon's gallery.
Image hosted by forum (1092319)

Photo from Terrycanon's gallery.
Image hosted by forum (1092320)

Congratulations! May you enjoy it over the years.

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Congrats!

I experienced the same thing back in 2015 when I got a new 5K 27" iMac to replace my circa-2007 iMac. . A world of difference!

But, 2015 was 6 years ago, and my then-new iMac is starting to get a bit slow and glitchy from time to time.

Also, the 3TB internal drive on my current iMac is chock full ..... every time I want to download something, I have to make room for it by deleting a bunch of photos. . I really hope that when I upgrade again in the near future, that Apple offers a 27" iMac with a MUCH bigger internal drive - like 10 or 15 TB. . External drives do not work at all for the way I use my iMac, so a huge increase in internal drive space would be extremely helpful.


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mathogre wrote in post #19207639
Congratulations! May you enjoy it over the years.

Thank you

Tom Reichner wrote in post #19207652
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Congrats!

I experienced the same thing back in 2015 when I got a new 5K 27" iMac to replace my circa-2007 iMac. . A world of difference!

But, 2015 was 6 years ago, and my then-new iMac is starting to get a bit slow and glitchy from time to time.

Also, the 3TB internal drive on my current iMac is chock full ..... every time I want to download something, I have to make room for it by deleting a bunch of photos. . I really hope that when I upgrade again in the near future, that Apple offers a 27" iMac with a MUCH bigger internal drive - like 10 or 15 TB. . External drives do not work at all for the way I use my iMac, so a huge increase in internal drive space would be extremely helpful.


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I manage with "only" 1TB storage. But I have several external hard drives, which I find work fine. The latest Mac offers up to 8TB, but that's a big extra expense. Yes, I realised my old one was slowing down but didn't realise by quite how much until I got the new one. Happy upgrading for you soon, hopefully.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #19207652
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External drives do not work at all for the way I use my iMac, so a huge increase in internal drive space would be extremely helpful.


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I'd be interested in why they don't work for you. I just had to take my new iMac in for service and that forced me to figure out a way to shoot/cull/edit swim meets in a single day on my MBP. So far, so good. Just curious.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #19207652
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Congrats!

I experienced the same thing back in 2015 when I got a new 5K 27" iMac to replace my circa-2007 iMac. . A world of difference!

But, 2015 was 6 years ago, and my then-new iMac is starting to get a bit slow and glitchy from time to time.

Also, the 3TB internal drive on my current iMac is chock full ..... every time I want to download something, I have to make room for it by deleting a bunch of photos. . I really hope that when I upgrade again in the near future, that Apple offers a 27" iMac with a MUCH bigger internal drive - like 10 or 15 TB. . External drives do not work at all for the way I use my iMac, so a huge increase in internal drive space would be extremely helpful.


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I don’t think there are any ssd’s bigger than 8TB and I doubt any new iMac models will have options for spinning drives. Apple currently offers an 8TB ssd as a $2400 upgrade. There are thunderbolt 3 external enclosures that will give you more storage for less, and provide better drive performance than what you have now.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #19207652
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External drives do not work at all for the way I use my iMac, so a huge increase in internal drive space would be extremely helpful.
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huntersdad wrote in post #19208136
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I'd be interested in why they don't work for you. I just had to take my new iMac in for service and that forced me to figure out a way to shoot/cull/edit swim meets in a single day on my MBP. So far, so good. Just curious.
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Because I absolutely LOVE Apple's program, "Photos", formerly called "iPhoto".

"Photos" is the program I use for my image library - where I store all of my images. . I so love the way it organizes all of my image files. . I have tried the file folder within a file file folder system that everybody else uses, and absolutely hate it. . Used that for years and years before I switched over to Apple computers, and when I discovered "Photos" (which was called iPhoto back then), I just couldn't believe how user-friendly and easy it made everything.

That program was a dream come true for me. . But the way it is set up on the computer, it needs to be on the internal drive. . All of the image files are actually inside of Photos, as opposed to Lightroom and other programs, where you have the image files in file folders, and then Lightroom accesses those files with a Directory or whatever it's called. . Photos is the only program I know of that is a RAW converter and also holds all of the image files within itself, instead of accessing files that reside elsewhere on the computer.

Most people say that the way "Photos" (formerly iPhoto) works is a disaster waiting to happen, and an asinine way to design a program to work. . Yet it is the only program that I have enjoyed using, after having used other programs for a long time and absolutely HATING the user interface.

The only problem is, because of the way it works, all of the image files need to exist on the internal drive itself, and not on an external drive. . If I have images on an external drive, then they are not in the "Photos" image library, which is where I prefer to have all of my images, because it is so easy to access and opens in half a second. . This means that my computer's internal drive fills up rapidly, because it is only 3TB, and I would like to have way more than 3TB worth of image files, so that I don't have to spend time "doing housekeeping" and deleting all of the bad images in order to clear out room for the new images that I take.

This wouldn't be an issue at all if the computer's internal drive was big enough to hold all of the photos that I ever take, but because it is only 3TB, and I want to take tens of thousands of terabytes worth of photos, it becomes an issue.

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Tom Reichner wrote in post #19208297
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Because I absolutely LOVE Apple's program, "Photos", formerly called "iPhoto".

"Photos" is the program I use for my image library - where I store all of my images. . I so love the way it organizes all of my image files. . I have tried the file folder within a file file folder system that everybody else uses, and absolutely hate it. . Used that for years and years before I switched over to Apple computers, and when I discovered "Photos" (which was called iPhoto back then), I just couldn't believe how user-friendly and easy it made everything.

That program was a dream come true for me. . But the way it is set up on the computer, it needs to be on the internal drive. . All of the image files are actually inside of Photos, as opposed to Lightroom and other programs, where you have the image files in file folders, and then Lightroom accesses those files with a Directory or whatever it's called. . Photos is the only program I know of that is a RAW converter and also holds all of the image files within itself, instead of accessing files that reside elsewhere on the computer.

Most people say that the way "Photos" (formerly iPhoto) works is a disaster waiting to happen, and an asinine way to design a program to work. . Yet it is the only program that I have enjoyed using, after having used other programs for a long time and absolutely HATING the user interface.

The only problem is, because of the way it works, all of the image files need to exist on the internal drive itself, and not on an external drive. . If I have images on an external drive, then they are not in the "Photos" image library, which is where I prefer to have all of my images, because it is so easy to access and opens in half a second. . This means that my computer's internal drive fills up rapidly, because it is only 3TB, and I would like to have way more than 3TB worth of image files, so that I don't have to spend time "doing housekeeping" and deleting all of the bad images in order to clear out room for the new images that I take.

This wouldn't be an issue at all if the computer's internal drive was big enough to hold all of the photos that I ever take, but because it is only 3TB, and I want to take tens of thousands of terabytes worth of photos, it becomes an issue.

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You can move a Photos library to an external drive.

https://support.apple.​com/en-us/HT201517

I put 64gb in mine. Night and day difference.

Tom, I get that regarding external drives et al. I have an iMac from November 2019, 27", 32GB, 2TB internal, and 18TB external (3 x 4TB; 2 x 3TB). I don't regularly use Photos; I use the Adobe Photographer package w/ Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. I love my system.

When I bought it, I got a USB 3.0 hub I connect directly to a USB 3 port on the back of my iMac. I have multiple external drives connected either to that hub or to the iMac directly. They're not normal externals, however.

What I did for externals (the three new 4TB drives) was to buy internal 3.5" hard drives and USB 3 hard drive enclosures. I did not buy pre-made externals. I actually tried using those recently, and found their "USB 3" connections were horribly slow. Below are links to the items I purchased, not because you should buy them but because I bought these 16 months ago and they worked.

Hub:
https://www.amazon.com …tle_o03_s00?ie=​UTF8&psc=1

Drives:
https://www.amazon.com …tle_o04_s00?ie=​UTF8&psc=1

Enclosures:
https://www.amazon.com …tle_o04_s00?ie=​UTF8&psc=1

I chose the hub on the basis of what I thought would work. The drives are hit-and-miss, but WD and Seagate are typically okay. I've used Vantec enclosures for a long time. While imperfect, they're overall good. Occasionally a drive will appear to disconnect. Turn the drive off; reinsert the USB cable at the drive multiple times as the contacts may not be clean; turn the drive back on and use Disk Utility to verify the drive health, which for me is always good; and return to business as usual.

Hope this helps!

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kd_reno wrote in post #19208302
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You can move a Photos library to an external drive.

https://support.apple.​com/en-us/HT201517
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That would be awesome! . But ....... a bit scary. . I mean, if anything went wrong, I would lose what I have spent the best years of my life working on. . My photos mean more to me than anything in the world ...... seriously.

I may buy a HUGE external drive, and then call Apple Support to have them walk me through the process of transferring the Photos program to the external drive. . Of course, it is the program itself that I would need to transfer, along with all of the images that are in it. . Just transferring the image files wouldn't help at all unless they were contained within the program and the whole program went with them.

I have already talked with Apple Support personnel about this, a couple years ago. . They said that it was possible, but that there are no guarantees that it can be done without any risk. . And the program "Photos" can reside on only ONE drive - meaning that if I put it all on an external drive, it cannot also exist on the internal drive. . It can be moved, but never copied, according to what two different Apple Support people told me a couplefew years ago.


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Tom Reichner wrote in post #19208327
That would be awesome! But ....... a bit scary. I mean, if anything went wrong, I would lose what I have spent the best years of my life working on. My photos mean more to me than anything in the world ...... seriously.

Wow, I'm surprised you haven't at least backed up your photos Tom. Lightroom and Photoshop are my editing programs, and while I do incremental backups of my catalogues....I'll do my first edits on my SSD. I'll then move RAWs and processed RAWs to one external drive (and then to be anal, also backup jpegs on cloud formats and duplicate external drive backups as well).

It's really easy to get a 12TB or larger external platter drive now (better yet RAID system...for redundant backups). It's also more of a standard now in which people use faster internal SSDs as their main drives and external drives for large amounts of data.

I got a MacBook Pro when Catalina came out, and I don't think iPhoto was included (at least I have iMovie, but no iPhoto). Looking at my own folder structure, I do see that iMovie is in my [User]/Library folder. For the Photos app, I've only used it for accessing cloud photos from my iPhones. For my config, those locally stored photos from the cloud are in an encapsulated folder (that may look like a Photos app for a computer novice) titled "Photos Library.photoslibrary"​. If that's your whole catalogue, it may appear to be a really large file. Before following the above steps for migration, you can always copy over this folder to a larger external drive.

I'm interested in seeing what new Apple silicon comes out. Apple is no longer producing iMac Pro models (assumption being that their chipsets will be faster with Mac software than Intel Xeon architecture). I'm most anticipating the MBP 16. However, I still have my Intel I9 MBP 15 as well as just getting a 14" AMD PC gaming laptop for PC tasks. One of the main negatives about the new Apple silicon for my software development, though, is that Virtual Box isn't supported (not even with Rosetta). So looks like I'll still be using multiple computers.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #19208297
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Because I absolutely LOVE Apple's program, "Photos", formerly called "iPhoto".

"Photos" is the program I use for my image library - where I store all of my images. . I so love the way it organizes all of my image files. . I have tried the file folder within a file file folder system that everybody else uses, and absolutely hate it. . Used that for years and years before I switched over to Apple computers, and when I discovered "Photos" (which was called iPhoto back then), I just couldn't believe how user-friendly and easy it made everything.

That program was a dream come true for me. . But the way it is set up on the computer, it needs to be on the internal drive. . All of the image files are actually inside of Photos, as opposed to Lightroom and other programs, where you have the image files in file folders, and then Lightroom accesses those files with a Directory or whatever it's called. . Photos is the only program I know of that is a RAW converter and also holds all of the image files within itself, instead of accessing files that reside elsewhere on the computer.

Most people say that the way "Photos" (formerly iPhoto) works is a disaster waiting to happen, and an asinine way to design a program to work. . Yet it is the only program that I have enjoyed using, after having used other programs for a long time and absolutely HATING the user interface.

The only problem is, because of the way it works, all of the image files need to exist on the internal drive itself, and not on an external drive. . If I have images on an external drive, then they are not in the "Photos" image library, which is where I prefer to have all of my images, because it is so easy to access and opens in half a second. . This means that my computer's internal drive fills up rapidly, because it is only 3TB, and I would like to have way more than 3TB worth of image files, so that I don't have to spend time "doing housekeeping" and deleting all of the bad images in order to clear out room for the new images that I take.

This wouldn't be an issue at all if the computer's internal drive was big enough to hold all of the photos that I ever take, but because it is only 3TB, and I want to take tens of thousands of terabytes worth of photos, it becomes an issue.

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I also use Photos and being a hobbyist, have never wished for anything more. I did purchase a couple of small, external SSD portable drives. Each of them are 1 TB. With Photos, you can export a entire folder, as it is configured on your Mac and then if you want to photos again, it is very easy to plug in the drive and import the photos or the entire folder back into Photos. I had not been doing this but decided to try it for space and for a back up.

I move the photos folder by folder, I have not moved the entire library at once.