Why is it so much easier to have a gigantic photo library today?

[GooseInTheCaboose]

Serious question.

I'm a bit of a dinosaur and I remember the days when MBPs would struggle with a large photo library of more than ~5-10,000 photos. In those days you would need to max out your RAM to ensure that scrolling through the library would not get laggy. But at that size even the top spec models would have their fans ramped up and you would get beach balls just from scrolling through a library of that size. Try doing that with a big itunes library open at the same time? Crash. lol

Now today MBPs can handle libraries perhaps 50x that size without the slightest hickup. It seems that this is not limited to the top models but even the most basic. Heck, even the iPads do it well.

What happened in these years? Did Apple change their computers to better handle large photo libraries? Did it simply change the software so that it relies on previews more?

I remember back in the day the computer's ability to handle my large photo library was my key priority when shopping for a new mac...nowadays, by contrast this is a non-issue! What changed?

 

[ian87w]

Probably couple of things:
- simply better CPUs. Apple silicon has 8 cores, compared to a traditional intel that only has 2 or 4 cores at best.
- Much better GPU. Apple made huge improvements on GPU. With Metal, a lot of UI acceleration is handled through GPU.
- Metal on macOS and iOS, meaning the software has direct access to the GPU, resulting in better performance
- fast SSDs
- Better/optimized database library

Also, when showing the thousand of photos, the Photos app is not showing all the full res photos. It actually created and kept smaller thumbnails that don't take as much resources to show and scroll. Same thing with iCloud Photos. When you are looking at the photo, it's not the actual file, but it's an optimized version. The software would load the actual file when you're going to edit or export the photo.

 

[jav6454]

For starters, Apple is making their own CPUs with hardware accelerators for media (photos and videos). Furthermore, Apple's CPUs have better memory management in terms of speed.

Lastly OS X has taken new technologies that makes such events a breeze.