Photo Processing Concern

[Paul in OKC]

Right now I have several hundred pictures on my computer (in 10 - 15 folders) Is this slowing my computer down? Should I put the photos on a thumb drive or on CD's? I am concerned that I may be "bogging down" my computer with these numerous folders filled with photos on my desktop. Comments?

[EOSThree]

I have 9,942 photos totaling 104GB in approximately 40 folders on my laptop's hard drive. I routinely keep the last 3 years on my HD and keep all of my photos on an external drive. The Hard Drive is just a storage unit, just like a CD or DVD, only it's magnetic. It will run fine at capacity. Maybe it's slowing down my system a little, but I have no real problems with speed. My 500 GB HD is about halfway full.
MBP, i5, 2.53 Ghz, 4 GB ram, 500 GB HD.

So I guess my answer to your question is no, I wouldn't worry about it. Unless your HD is nearly full and there is no room left to swap files, it shouldn't have any problems storing the amount of data it was designed to store.

[Uber_Tiny]

Just like all the other files and folders on the PC, it shouldn't cause any slowdown. I would recommend having a dedicated files HDD and not put the files on the same HDD as your OS.

[PWhite214]

Having files on your hard drive should not cause your computer to slow down. File fragmentation can make your file access time a little longer, but does not affect your operating system speed.

I would recommend the purchase of an external hard drive (or two) for backups. See the thread on this forum What if you lost your digital images? . A 2 TB drive can be bought for less than $100 US, which I feel is cheap insurance against my main hard drive failing.

Backing up the files to CD, DVD or Blu Ray is not a bad idea.

Phil

[freygr]

Right now I have several hundred pictures on my computer (in 10 - 15 folders) Is this slowing my computer down? Should I put the photos on a thumb drive or on CD's? I am concerned that I may be "bogging down" my computer with these numerous folders filled with photos on my desktop. Comments?

No! There are many things which can slow down your computer and data files ( photo, word, excell, Photoshop ) are not one of the causes of a slow computer.

Slow boot - most likely fix is registry clean and Defrag followed by Disk Defrag

Slow operating - registry clean and Defrag may help, and maybe uninstalling some unused programs and window extensions. Disk Defrag may also help if the swap file is fragmented.

But make sure you are running an anti-virus program, NOTE anti-virus program if not set up correctly can make your computer slow.

[Anbesol]

Actually, data files CAN cause slowdown on your computer, this is particularly the case if you are running an older operating system like windows XP, but it will only cause any slowdown if you put the folders on your boot drive. Files and folders can create disk fragmentation, especially when moving them around and reading/writing access to them frequently. That said, its certainly not a big deal and it shouldn't stop you from keeping them. If you are running an older OS, make sure to defragment your hard drive when needed, the defrag utility should tell you how fragmented your hard drive is. Modern OS's like Apples Lion and Windows 7 have automatic disk defragmenting, so this is done automatically without your intervention, but the defrag utilities can still be accessed to examine the fragmentation of your HD. If at all possible, its a good idea to add another hard drive to your desktop and put media files and documents on that one. This saves your primary hard drive for your Operating system and program files. If not possible, the next best thing is to partition your primary hard drive into two partitions, one for operating system and program files, and the other for media and documents.

All that said, it is not really a top priority, as even if it IS causing slowdown, the difference is small, and if running Win 7 or Lion, the difference is nearly negligible. But if you are, like me, keen on optimizing your hardware for the best possible performance, then get yourself another hard drive.

Also be sure to always keep at least 10% of your hard drive space available. Things will certainly start slowing down in a very noticeable way if you start exceeding 90% data capacity on your primary HD.

[Franglais]

The only time I managed to slow down one of my systems was when I copied 80,000 photos to the C: drive while I was doing other things at the same time. System startup was noticably slower afterwards and the system sometimes felt sluggish.

I figure that when the mass of photo files was being created some other important files being created or extended at the same time got fragmented and slowed down the system (anti-virus??). I transferred the photo files to an external drive, defragmented the C: drive and all went back to normal.

I never let my C: drive go over 75% full so that the defragmenter has lots of space to work with. I never install more than the bare minimum of software that I actually need. And I disable unnecessary background tasks (like software that does a popup when I put a CD in the drive)

Afterthought for the other techos out there:
I was going to put "anti-virus?? pagefile??" but then I always have a fixed-size pagefile to avoid fragmentation, don't I?
Well I checked on the portable I'm using (I'm in Budapest right now) and NO the pagefile is set by the system and even worse it's trimmed the size down to 3GB instead of the recommended 4.3GB (this is a 4GB Vista machine). AGH. At least the disk is defragmented every night.
But finally - all I'm doing here is some web browsing, Lightroom, ACDSee, one after the other, nothing complex. I probably never go over 3GB of RAM used anyway. Maybe the system does know what it's doing after all...
Opinions?

[Anbesol]

Get rid of Vista and get yourself Win 7, you can get a system builder version for cheap. 7 automatically manages so many of the tasks much better, and works with hardware much better. The difference may be small in appearance, but under the hood Win 7 runs smooth, quick, and works incredibly well with hardware (almost like the opposite of vista)

[Franglais]

Get rid of Vista and get yourself Win 7, you can get a system builder version for cheap. 7 automatically manages so many of the tasks much better, and works with hardware much better. The difference may be small in appearance, but under the hood Win 7 runs smooth, quick, and works incredibly well with hardware (almost like the opposite of vista)

Good point.

I already have a minimum Windows 7 64 bit + VMWARE system on the 2nd partition to do tests for my work (network of EXCHANGE 20xx servers). I now do these tests on a bigger system. I guess I could switch over to Windows 7, upgrade the disk to a 7200rpm hybrid drive and be happy for another 2 years.

That should keep me occupied when I get home.

It used to be that I took photos on holiday then sorted them out when I got home. As I now have my complete photo lab plus my entire photo library with me (on external drive) I treat the photos I do immediately and I even even do some sorting of my past photos in my hotel room when taking a break.

[mattb]

Good advice from Anbesol.
Win7 > Visa for many reasons. The only reason not to upgrade is if you plan on getting a new machine soon. The cheapest way to get Windows is with a computer purchase.

Also, swap file use is important to consider if your drive(s) is/are almost full. If the OS can't use the swap file size it needs, much more swapping (moving data from ram which is fast to hard drive which is much slower and back) has to occur and that can significantly slow a system down. Drives can get even so full that Windows stops working. You don't want to be in that situation!

One more thing that has been mentioned but is important to say again. Backup! I've seen and heard many sad stories of data loss. Don't be another one.

Matt (pro geek at my day job)