Two Mac Questions

Trasmc · March 18, 2007

Hi everyone,

I'm considering buying a new 20" iMac (2.16GHz version, w/ 2GB RAM). Two questions:

1. Will this be enough horsepower for CS3 (when it comes out)?

2. I love the built in mac slideshow screensaver. On our very old iBook, when the screen saver kicks on there is about a 30 second period of a black screen before the slideshow starts - I'm assuming the computer is caching the images for use in the slideshow. If (when) I get the iMac, I will transfer about 10,000 images from my current PC - and am assuming this is far too many images for the slideshow to use due to the initial cache.

However, I also like the idea of random images from the last several years coming up as a screensaver - is there a different mac slideshow screensaver out there that won't choke on this volume?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Scott

DavidTO · March 18, 2007

1. Depending on your use of PS, yes. The big limitation, IMO is the lack of room to expand the RAM. But for most of us, 2 or 3 gigs is OK. The machine is certainly fast enough, otherwise.

2. Hmmm. I don't know for sure how the slideshow works, but I doubt that the size of the folder is going to impact the start up time much. Other things such as RAM, disk usage by other apps, CPU load, etc. will impact it, but not the size of the folder, IMO. It's not like it's loading the entire folder before starting, just enough to get it going, is all.

colourbox · March 18, 2007

I have the same suspicion about the slide show. To speed it up, I made a folder and put aliases (shortcuts) of my favorite photos in there, and the pointed the slide show to it. That way, I have control over how many, and leave out pictures that aren't that interesting.

You don't have to dig through folders to find your favorites, either. If you use a Mac photo browser apps (Bridge, iView, etc) and you already have a collection ready, you can usually create aliases on the fly to a folder on the desktop using the Opt-Command-drag method.

Trasmc · March 18, 2007

I use a form of the alias idea on the iBook, and it does work well.

However on my PC I like that any picture from my library can come up - especially when I have so many. So I am really looking for something that can access all of them without what I am assuming would be a huge delay before the show begins.

DavidTO · March 18, 2007

Well, I would wager that the built-in slideshow is your best bet, and I would also wager that the faster machine will deal with loading the SS faster. Give it a shot!

Poseidon · March 18, 2007

Trasmc, don't sweat it. I use the slideshow screen saver on my Mac, with over 60,000 pictures in the folder I point it too! DavidTO is right, (as usual) the app only loads what it needs to get going...

cabbey · March 19, 2007

There *is* one case where I've noticed the default slideshow screen saver taking a while to start displaying the first image like Trasmc mentioned. That is when the first image it pics is very very large. Case in point, I used to have a few "apotd" images in my folder of screen saver content. These tend to be available in two sizes, tiny and gianourmous. The tiny little previews at 200 ish pixels wide looked awefull when stretched to 1600 for my monitor, so I used the larger versions (some of which are in the 40,000 pixels wide range), loaded off an nfs mount. On the occasions that it picked one of those images as the first one to display, it would take a while before the screen would come back up from black. Best I can tell, it was done with the network read (tcpdump on the server said so anyway) and it was chewing on the image internally to resize it (top seems to agree that it became cpu bound for a bit). I solved this by manually scaling the images down to something "saner" for my display, like around 2048 pixels wide. (wider than my screen, so it still does the Ken Burns style pans and zooms, but not insanely wide.) Once it has the first image displayed, you don't really notice that time for subsequent images as the previous image is already up and displayed. But top running under an ssh session shows that there is a spike of activity just before each new image is displayed.

DavidTO · March 19, 2007

This makes sense.

cabbey wrote:

There *is* one case where I've noticed the default slideshow screen saver taking a while to start displaying the first image like Trasmc mentioned. That is when the first image it pics is very very large. Case in point, I used to have a few "apotd" images in my folder of screen saver content. These tend to be available in two sizes, tiny and gianourmous. The tiny little previews at 200 ish pixels wide looked awefull when stretched to 1600 for my monitor, so I used the larger versions (some of which are in the 40,000 pixels wide range), loaded off an nfs mount. On the occasions that it picked one of those images as the first one to display, it would take a while before the screen would come back up from black. Best I can tell, it was done with the network read (tcpdump on the server said so anyway) and it was chewing on the image internally to resize it (top seems to agree that it became cpu bound for a bit). I solved this by manually scaling the images down to something "saner" for my display, like around 2048 pixels wide. (wider than my screen, so it still does the Ken Burns style pans and zooms, but not insanely wide.) Once it has the first image displayed, you don't really notice that time for subsequent images as the previous image is already up and displayed. But top running under an ssh session shows that there is a spike of activity just before each new image is displayed.

Two Mac Questions

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