Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Waiting for the Watched Pot

IMGP5586Over the past few days I have been loading my photos (and Videos) from SD card onto my photographic laptop and timing how long it takes to load using various software packages. Its a lot like watching a pot to boil (yes the old adage is “A watched pot never boils”) it does but it takes a long time. At first the results didn’t make a lot of sense, The number of files or combined file size didn’t seem to relate to the time taken. Clearly Picasa was fastest and Lightroom 5 Beta (LR5b) was generally slowest, with Photo Mechanic (PM) and Lightroom 4.4 (LR4.4) occasionally taking the longest. This didn’t make a lot of sense because whilst a lot of folk seem to complain LR4.4 is slow, many have suggested that LR5b and PM are much faster. I suspect they are faster for JPEG and Cannon’s RAW format .CR2 but they don’t perform so well with .mov or pentax’s RAW format .PEF, then I realised there was a serious flaw in my testing. The cards I used in the two cameras were rated for different speeds, You can tell from the little number inside the circle that should be printed on the SD cards label. My Canon was loaded with a 10 (10mb/sec) but the Pentax was only a 6 (6MB/sec), clearly this has had the biggest effect on the results but like watching the pot I’ve lost interest in trying to be scientific and fair. I just need to only use SD cards rated 10 and load my photos onto my computer using picasa. Enough time has been wasted already!
Number
& Size
camera
Type of
files
picasa
PM
LR4.4
LR5b
52(640mb)
canon
.jpg .cr2
25
37


215(1.7GB)
pentax
.jpg .pef
32
75
80
73
11(1.13gb)
Canon
.mov
35
36
75
111
134(1.4GB)
pentax
.jpg .pef
42
54
104

184(2.4GB)
pentax
.jpg .pef
57
100
102
129
8(889mb)
Canon
.mov
28
53
86
103
13(286)
Pentax
.jpg .pef
6
22

19
72(920mb)
pentax
.jpg .pef
18

58.9
73
3(69mb)
Canon
.mov
7

15
22

No comments: