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re: Use uncompressed TIFs to speed iPhoto
Authored by: danvtim on May 16, '03 03:59:15PM

It is interesting to note that they commented and said it's wrong without any real testing as you said. You may want to point out the the owner of this site your observations about the comments of others.

I would be interested in seeing if others get the same results as I did. I will do some more testing to see if it acts the same with photoshop documents.

I don't really know that much about Applescript and I have photoshop and use a simple action to save as an uncompressed TIFF which is easy to create. If you don't have Photoshop you should really consider buying Adobe elements which basically is all the features from photoshop that one needs for photo editing for $90. It's a steal at $90.



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re: Use uncompressed TIFs to speed iPhoto
Authored by: mweissen on May 19, '03 06:20:46AM

It is interesting to note that they commented and said it's wrong without any real testing as you said. You may want to point out the the owner of this site your observations about the comments of others.

Anything you say, online or otherwise, may be met with commentary and/or criticism. It's part of human interaction and communication. I don't know who is going to complain to whom about what, but surely you realize that the ability to comment and discuss is what keeps people coming back to this site? Do you want to censor all feedback, or only negative feedback? Does this apply to all hints, or only those submitted by you? Post one negative comment and be banished forever? Tough...

It's easier to flame people semi-anonymously on the Internet, though. Sometimes you just don't think far enough before you press the Send button. I'm sorry if my fr1st p0st seemed obnoxious, it wasn't intended that way. I should also have posted my informal (infernal?) benchmarks straight away, instead of letting you assume that I was speaking out of my hat. (Sorry. My loss.)

In my opinion, the real value of the hint is that iPhoto can handle other formats than JPEG, which is interesting and something I can see myself making use of. I'm not really interested in seeing whether iPhoto is 13.7% faster or 16.2% slower when using uncompressed TIFFs. In my experience, TIFFs are slower than JPEGs, and I have attributed this to various technical reasons and backed up the claim using numbers in an earlier post today. The difference (around 15% on my TiBook) is not great and entirely within the margin of error. Laptops have slower disks anyway, and it's possible that your system with it's shining new 10 kRPM 250MB disks is a bit faster in that department. OK?

I'm however criticizing the way the hint is presented as gospel to all iPhoto users: Do you think iPhoto is slow? Then convert your library and feel the speedup! The hint is written as if it is intended for Mom-and-Pop iPhoto users. But when you drill down to the crux of the matter, you find that those who really could benefit from the hint are those semi-professional photographers with enough money to buy a decent camera rig, but not enough to buy a recent Mac, yet just enough to buy a few big hard disks.

The hint says that "you should convert your photos to TIFs for editing and printing", but this is true only for certain meanings of "editing and printing". If you're a photo pro, then yes, nothing beats TIFF (or RAW). Uncompressed TIFFs take a little more space than compressed TIFFs (from 14MB to something over 20MB) and are faster to use, no problem there. Small price, big gain. But most iPhoto users couldn't tell a JPEG from a TIFF if it bit them in the arse (sorry, couldn't find any statistics here either) and for them, "editing" means changing the contrast using iPhoto. For these people, converting their library is a waste of time and disk space. The file sizes go from 2.2MB to over 20MB, and it isn't worth it for one lousy contrast change.

The last paragraph is the killer: "you can use iPhoto itself to convert the files [...] if you don't have Photoshop". If you don't have Photoshop or MacGimp or any other heavy-duty image editing application, it is probable that you do not care enough about image quality to benefit from this hint. Am I right? Those who are interested in getting good quality prints get the tools for the job. Photoshop is one such tool, MacGimp another. iPhoto caters to another segment (although the cataloging feature may be useful for pros too).

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re: Use uncompressed TIFs to speed iPhoto
Authored by: danvtim on May 19, '03 11:58:03AM

I just gave my observations. If it does not work for you than state that it did not work and show why. As I said before, try it for yourself. If it works for you, then great. If it does not, than do not use it.

The other poster was the one who pointed out that you were stating opinion and did not show any measurable tests which he believes runs counter to the purpose of this site.



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