TEN is an ongoing serial effort to highlight points of value within a topic without watering anything down or writing a full blown novel. Obviously there are more factors involved with some decisions and less with others. But in a nutshell creatives in general and the world on whole have a tendency to make processes more involved than they need to be.

The previous TEN post was on saying no and the power it holds. This time around I’m highlighting a number of issues that affect every photographer at some point in workflow though aren’t all that well known. Be it a lack of manufacturer presentation, spotty resources or simply oversight on the user end I’ve come across these issues numerous times and still hear the same questions almost regularly.

1: computer investments should put processor power ahead of RAM - most systems, including mac, don’t allow you to swap processors later but you can always replace and upgrade RAM.

2: lightroom catalogs max out at around 40,000 images. this number is from an adobe tech and i have also heard 25,000 as a limit though have well over that in more than one catalog. the future number, according to beta rumors, is one million.

3: lightroom is not (yet) a network based application - meaning your catalogs can’t be on an external drive. the images themselves can be but none of this works on a network across several computers.

4: retrospect works only with external drives that are directly connected to the computer you’d like to backup/copy/duplicate. again, no network love here.

5: mac pros, at least the newest ones, take PCI E for express cards - don’t be fooled.

6: even the new firewire 800 drobos don’t cut it as main drive material - they are for secondary storage or archiving only.

7: the latest iphone incarnation is dialed in with reqall reportedly - will be testing this soon.

8: since Western Digital makes drives themselves, not just shells like LaCie and others, they tend to use higher end units in their own systems and sell lower end units to the other companies to put in their snazzy shells. they also make a new green power series of drives. interesting spin for the my book series.

9: mobile me will take some tweaking to get in order, especially if you have multiple machines to sync.

10: the latest update to heathkorvola.com is iphone compatible - enjoy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.