As followup on this thread: Adobe released Lightroom 4.1RC yesterday. I decided to test it, along with an external drive that a client was having some problems with. So last night I copied a 300G subset of my original image file repository to it (drive works fine, I think the client's 2006 MacBook simply isn't putting out enough power on the USB or FireWire ports to support a 500G portable drive...). This morning I used LR4.1RC to create a new catalog and import all those files in place (19,700 12 to 18 Mpixel raw originals plus a few hundred 60-130 Mbyte TIFF-DNG scan files), creating a full cache of normal size previews in the process.
With the MacBook Pro 13" and 2.4Ghz processor, Import in place took about 25 minutes, then it started the preview rendering process. I stopped it to head to the office and carried the drive with me. Now I have it continuing the preview process in the background while I do all my other work in another space. Memory is all being used, but I'm not seeing any slow-downs either in Lightroom or in my other work, so whatever the MacBook Air's i5 1.7Ghz processor is doing seems to be working just fine. The preview rendering process is about 2/3 of the way to completed, should be done by the time I go home. I've edited and exported a few photos while it was doing that too, just to see, and the performance is just fine for me. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.