Is the Macbook Air just slow? I'm trying to import photos- the fan kicked on and....

[davidd31415]

The first real task aside from browsing that I gave my new Macbook Air was to import 1500 photos into the photo library. I had previously copied them all (approx 5 GB) to a folder on the desktop.

The photos started importing as I would expect but about 25% to 50% of the way through things slowed down. When I look at iPhoto I see a new photo about every two-three seconds. The fan kicked on and the computer is not moving very quickly.

I checked out the activity monitor, closed other applications... Didn't seem to do a thing. Is this computer just that slow?

I'm thinking about trading for a Macbook Pro now, if I decide to keep a Mac.

Thanks.

 

[entatlrg]

Don't worry too much about it.

My wife had a 2010 i7 MacBook Pro 15" that she used as her main/photo machine etc. The fans roar on it too and things slowed down.

She finds the 2010 13" Ultimate she has now more 'zippy' when moving photo's and video.

I have a 17" quad core here, it's fast all right, but doesn't take much for the fans to roar on it either, and when transferring a lot of volume there are points where it slows down too.

Hopefully others with real life experience will comment on this as well.

 

[oakie]

iPhoto is notorious for its poor handling of large import jobs, mainly because it wasnt designed with large imports in mind.

if this is a "one-time thing" and you're importing your whole photo collection all in one shot, you'll just have to deal with it, and you likely wont encounter the problem again unless you try to do another massive library import, obviously. for future reference, just break up the import job into no more than a couple hundred photos at a time and it'll go much more smoothly.

if you're a photographer or a photographer-at-heart and expect to import large batches of photos often, then consider using something designed to handle large collections and imports more efficiently, like Lightroom or Aperture.