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Originals (RAW) location - seeking for advice

Permanently deleted user
  • Edited

Hello all,

During the Live session on Catalogs it was mentioned, that mostly location of the catalog matters for performance and images might be stored on the external drive without any performance issues.

Just would like to get your experience on performance of catalog and edits if all originals are stored on the external HDD (not SSD). All previews created with 3840px.

Setup: iMac M1 + WD My Book USB 3.0

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  • Permanently deleted user

    That depends much on your intended use. If you just import images into the catalog and choose the RAWs to be stored on an external drive and the catalog on your internal SSD or an external SSD with TB4 you wont' experience much of a delay - if at all.

    Editing / renaming a lot of pictures as a batch can become a different story in my experience and lead to many crashes in the past with my hardware setting: iMac 2020, 8 core i9, 32GB RAM, external Samsung SSD in TB3 daisy chain and OWC RAID 1+0 on the other end. The crashes usually occured in batch renaming and applying presets/styles to a couple of pictures, especially cropping was a pest - or a safe way to provoke a crash depending how I see it.

    Same actions on DxO Photolab: not a single crash. PL appeared to be a bit slower, but if I add the time to bring the catalog back in order, it was more likely C1 being the slowing down app. I never did that kind of intense editing before on C1, so if you had asked me ¼ year ago, I would have replied "everything is going smooth". So I doubt it's my hardware settings causing the crashes but C1's various bugs and structural flaws, but maybe it's both.

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Thanks a lot for your reply and sharing your experience.

    I would not even doubt to use SSD, but since my external disk is Hard Disk Drive - I'm afraid to have a performance issues even for casual editing. Or am I wrong?

     

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Capture doesn't use RAW files, except when zooming at 100% (needed for layers, local corrections,...) and exporting. When doing global adjustments, you won't feel any slowdown as Capture One works on previews, which are stored into the catalogue.

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Capture doesn't use RAW files, except...

    when you work with smaller thumbnails than your screen is. Like use the standard 2560 pixel wide thumbnails, but working on a 4K screen. Meaning if you start working with a "small" screen like an iMac with the 2560 pixel resolution and update to a 5K iMac, you can try to live with the constant need to access RAW files in 100% view or the slightly blurred thumbnail views. Or increase the default thumbnail size and ignite the calculation of new thumbnails.

    And when you export a lot of pictures or move the RAW files within C1: this depends on the RAW file size, the speed (and possibly size) of your external drive and the speed of the USB connector. But I have here a G-data on TB3 which should be a faster connection than USB-C. But safe that money, it's nearly exactly the same diskspeed. But I'm not too sure about your WD MyBook on USB 3.

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Since we started a subject of Preview Image Size - would 3840px be enough for 4.5k iMac M1? Or better to go for 5140px? 

    Since I have XT-30 originals are 4992px by 3328px and I'm also curious what will happen if I select the thumbnail of 5140px: would C1 keep original (4992px) or upscale it to 5140px.

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Interestingly, David Grover touched on this in last week's webinar. To get full-size previews, a 2K monitor needs 2560 pxl; 4K needs 3840 pxl and 5K monitors need 5120 pxl. If you started with a 2K monitor, for example, and upgraded to a 4K, you'd go into Preferences, change the default preview size to 3480 pxl, and then decide whether to have C1 generate new previews for all images in your catalog, or wait till you need to work on an old image and let C1 generate new previews as you go. If it was me, I'd just have C1 regenerate all previews for as long as it takes and then not have to worry about it. Just make sure your catalog is on a volume with enough space to handle the larger preview storage needs.

    As others said, once previews are generated, C1 has little reason to access the originals other than during export, file renaming, and some other things. My catalog has been on an internal SSD for several years, and earlier this year I replaced the aging external HDD that held image files with an SSD. I haven't noticed an appreciable performance impact in my workflow. 

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