How does M1 do with large Photos libraries?

[jse75]

Seen a lot of nice videos etc on things I don't do, like compiling, rendering 4K video.
How do the new M1 Macs do with Photos with large photo libraries? (Lightroom maybe not relevant because it's not yet updated for M1)
Eg if you have 100,000 photo library, 50,000 photo library, etc, a mix of JPG and RAW+JPG and HEICs, even on upper end iMacs with lots of RAM Photos will start to stutter pretty dramatically. How is the M1?

 

[ISU Clones]

I am also interested in feedback on this topic. Have an old iMac that really needs to be retired. Would love to switch to the M1 Mac Mini ... but we have close to 100k photos on it and I am nervous about the limit on RAM. (The photos will be on a Thundebolt RAID drive.). Can it handle that Photos Library?

 

[AppleFeller]

How much ram does the current iMac have... if you have 16, get 16 and it'll be fine....viewing a large photo library even that large should not be an issue. Especially viewing externally off a thunderbolt raid array, the bottleneck will not be the Mac M1.

 

[mj_]

Why wouldn't it? It's not like the M1 Mac, or any other Mac for that matter, is going to hold the entire photo library in memory. It will still load photos from disk on demand and only keep in memory what is currently required.

I have roughly 15,000 photos in my library and regardless of Mac, whether it's my 16 GB iMac or my 8 GB MacBook Air, Photos only requires around 250 MB of RAM upon launch. Loading several photos, launching the built-in editor, or tagging faces resulted in a maximum RAM usage of 700 MB. Honestly, the issue of "are 8 GB enough or not" is massively overblown. Then again this is the internet, where 64 GB 32-core high-performance workstations are more often than not considered barely capable of rendering a web page in adequate time.

 

[IowaLynn]

Apple or Adobe? iCoud or local?

My 2015 MacBook dual core 8/256GB was sluggish but not my i5 mini 16/512. 60,000 photos. Also disk access is now 2200MB/sec so copying 100GB just flies as i reorganized photos from a T7.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

55,000+ photo library in Apple Photos. Mix of JPG, RAW, HEIC, and various videos.

Skimming the library is just as fast as on my Intel MacBook Pro.

But "skimming the library" shouldn't be slow - it uses cached smaller images, not the full-size.

 

[hugodrax]

I have 2 libraries of 200K photos open, one huge on LR and one on iPhoto and I am running 4 photo apps concurrently as well ie iPhoto,LR,pixelmator pro, affinity pro.

and bunch of other stuff. Its lightning fast and the Mac mini makes no sound at all. This is crazy impressive.

 

[DeanL]

The CPU does not go nuts unlike my 2019 T2 MacBook Pro.

 

[serialtoon]

Why wouldn't it? It's not like the M1 Mac, or any other Mac for that matter, is going to hold the entire photo library in memory. It will still load photos from disk on demand and only keep in memory what is currently required.

I have roughly 15,000 photos in my library and regardless of Mac, whether it's my 16 GB iMac or my 8 GB MacBook Air, Photos only requires around 250 MB of RAM upon launch. Loading several photos, launching the built-in editor, or tagging faces resulted in a maximum RAM usage of 700 MB. Honestly, the issue of "are 8 GB enough or not" is massively overblown. Then again this is the internet, where 64 GB 32-core high-performance workstations are more often than not considered barely capable of rendering a web page in adequate time.

The argument about not enough RAM is hilarious. You have a ton of people buying machines that are “future proof” that they replace next year when the new model comes out.

 

[shady825]

I don't know what you consider 'large' but I have an old hard drive copied to my new M1 Air. It's about 8000 photos. I've noticed I can scroll as fast as I want and all the thumbnails are loaded. My 2017 MacBook Pro would have a hard time keeping up doing the same thing. Sometimes would even take a second or two to catch up and display the thumbnail

 

[shady825]

The argument about not enough RAM is hilarious.

I've noticed a few times that finder is using almost 2gb of ram.
I have been going through a large library of photos and moving them around to folders and just trying to organize things. Do you think that's the cause? I have "relaunched" finder and the memory drops down to about 180mb

 

[tokyojimu]

Why wouldn't it?

Because older machines, like my 12" MacBook, even with 16 GB of RAM, can be a complete dog when running Photos. I have 45,000 pictures and it's beach ball city. Just starting the program can take 5 minutes or more and going from one picture to the next can take a minute or more. It's basically unusable (but I persevere).

 

[hugodrax]

Seen a lot of nice videos etc on things I don't do, like compiling, rendering 4K video.
How do the new M1 Macs do with Photos with large photo libraries? (Lightroom maybe not relevant because it's not yet updated for M1)
Eg if you have 100,000 photo library, 50,000 photo library, etc, a mix of JPG and RAW+JPG and HEICs, even on upper end iMacs with lots of RAM Photos will start to stutter pretty dramatically. How is the M1?

I have libraries over 100K big in LR and photos. M1 cuts through them like a hot knife on butter. I suspect its the extra HW functions available in M1 the do not exist on intel.

 

[tonyxcom]

I can't even get Lightoom Classic to import jpegs on my 8/512 MBA.

I sync the Camera Uploads folder in my Dropbox account to quickly bring my iPhone's camera roll into Lightroom. On a brand new install, if I choose to import the folder it takes a colossal amount of time to show just the thumbnails of the images as you choose them for import. Currently just 77 jpgs and mov files. I disabled all the address lookups and face detection. Also tried hardware acceleration on and off.

It will probably take hours to import 77 photos/videos. Took more than 5 minutes to show this single thumbnail.

 

[dmccloud]

I can't even get Lightoom Classic to import jpegs on my 8/512 MBA.

I sync the Camera Uploads folder in my Dropbox account to quickly bring my iPhone's camera roll into Lightroom. On a brand new install, if I choose to import the folder it takes a colossal amount of time to show just the thumbnails of the images as you choose them for import. Currently just 77 jpgs and mov files. I disabled all the address lookups and face detection. Also tried hardware acceleration on and off.

It will probably take hours to import 77 photos/videos. Took more than 5 minutes to show this single thumbnail.

I just imported 534 photos using my M1 Pro with 8GB RAM - took less than a minute...

 

[acidfast7_redux]

The argument about not enough RAM is hilarious. You have a ton of people buying machines that are “future proof” that they replace next year when the new model comes out.

I agree. People really get caught up in the RAM thing. I always buy the minimal spec machines and run it for at least 5 years.

 

[tonyxcom]

So I pressed import despite the lack of preview thumbnails. Took about 30ish minutes to import those iPhone photos.

As a test, I copied the Camera Uploads folder out of Dropbox and deleted the videos and PNG files. It just had iPhone 12 Pro jpegs. It took over 30 minutes to import 50ish images and build smart previews for them. Switching between images in the library seemed normal. But switching between them in the develop tab was pretty painful. Between 5-10 seconds to render. I'd expect this from RAW files from my EOS R, not jpegs from my iPhone.

So in my particular case, Lightroom Classic is basically useless. Hopefully it will be better on my 16/1TB Mini when it gets here next week.

 

[tfbalint]

Seen a lot of nice videos etc on things I don't do, like compiling, rendering 4K video.
How do the new M1 Macs do with Photos with large photo libraries? (Lightroom maybe not relevant because it's not yet updated for M1)
Eg if you have 100,000 photo library, 50,000 photo library, etc, a mix of JPG and RAW+JPG and HEICs, even on upper end iMacs with lots of RAM Photos will start to stutter pretty dramatically. How is the M1?

Currently, I'm finding my 2008 MacBook Pro with Aperture works just as well. With both setups I have my library stored on an external hard drive. A 2tb USB 3.0 with the M1 and a 1tb Firewire drive with the MacBook Pro. Simple things like selecting to import and accidentally hitting the export has it hanging and not just for a few seconds. We're talking minutes. I never experienced this with Aperture. Not even close.