Preview VERY slow with RAW files :-(

[snerkler]

I have an early 2012 (non retina) MBP with 2.2GHZ i7 processor, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD and am finding preview VERY slow when browsing RAW picture files.

My MBP came with Mountain Lion installed, and when Mavericks came out I installed that but had the same issue with RAW files as I have now, so went back to mountain lion.

I installed yosemite last week as Mountain Lion doesn't yet support RAW for my new Nikon D750 and initially preview worked fine. However, since yesterday it has started behaving how it did with Mavericks.

What I normally do with my RAW files is open them all in preview (select all then open) to look through them and decide which are keepers and which will go in the trash before importing into lightroom. However, when I do this now it takes an age (3-5s) to go from one pic to the next. Whilst 3-5s might not sound a lot, when you are sifting through hundreds of photos it quickly becomes very time consuming.

I am seriously considering going back to mountain lion and waiting for a RAW update. However, I don't know if they will as it requires the latest iphoto update which is only available for Yosemite AFAIK.

Before I do anything drastic does anyone know of a fix for this, or possibly even another photo viewer that I can use to sort through RAW files?

TIA

P.S. Does anyone have the link to send 'feedback' to apple so that I can report this please?

 

[Meister]

Using preview to do what you are describing is pretty ludacris.
It will eat up all your memory and cause beachballing.
I personally use finder for your described purpose.

 

[leman]

What is likely happening is that it tries to load all the files into RAM and probably stars paging out like crazy. As Meister says, using Quick Look might be a better choice here.

Ultimately, Preview's rendering engine should be rewritten from scratch and properly optimised. It is an amazing application with tons of useful functionality but the performance on large data sets has always been disappointing.

 

[OneAnswer]

QuickLook is much faster to do what you want to do.

P.S. Does anyone have the link to send 'feedback' to apple so that I can report this please?

One can almost not believe it, but it is really http://www.apple.com/feedback.

 

[snerkler]

Thanks for the help. How do I use finder to view photos?

As for preview being an issue and needing to be rewritten, why then did it work with ML but not subsequent OS's?

 

[Meister]

Thanks for the help. How do I use finder to view photos?

As for preview being an issue and needing to be rewritten, why then did it work with ML but not subsequent OS's?

Change the view option to the little window-shuffling icon. It's not ideal, but it works speedily.
You said your D750 is new. Are you sure you were looking at 25mb raw files in ML?

 

[OneAnswer]

Thanks for the help. How do I use finder to view photos?

Go to the folder with the photos, click on one, press the Spacebar.
QuickLook is there for you now.

Or you select all photos and press the Spacebar and can look at them in a grid.

 

[snerkler]

Change the view option to the little window-shuffling icon. It's not ideal, but it works speedily.

I'm not sure what you mean by this I just tried selecting all, then pressing spacebar and clicking the 'mouse' and it opened up all the images in finder. However, I can't delete individual images as I'm looking through the images, can this be done?

Edit: Ignore, just found out that if I don't select all it deletes then goes onto the next.

You said your D750 is new. Are you sure you were looking at 25mb raw files in ML?

Well I had the Sony A77 and then A77II previously (Sony files were 25mb), and still have the Olympus OMD EM10 and all those RAW files opened up speedily in preview in ML, but they don't in Yosemite either

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Go to the folder with the photos, click on one, press the Spacebar.
QuickLook is there for you now.

Or you select all photos and press the Spacebar and can look at them in a grid.

Thanks, just figured this out

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Thanks for the help guys, using finder will speed up my workflow no end

 

[snerkler]

Oh, one last thing before the thread's finished. Why did preview on Yosemite work fine with RAW files for a week or so, and then suddenly run into issues?

 

[aliensporebomb]

Ah

In my opinion, .NEF support SUCKS in Yosemite. I keep having to go back to .RAW support version 5.6 and it eventually fails and you have to delete, reboot, reinstall and try viewing the .NEFs again. I never should have went to Yosemite. Mavericks at least worked reliably.