I just switched a little more.
I’ve had my Mac Mini for many months now. Already it’s become my entertainment center. It has all my music and movies and serves as a backup for my laptop. This has allowed me to free up my laptop for real work stuff. The one thing that wasn’t working for me was photos. I tried iPhoto a few times and it was just blazingly slow. Like I could click on a photo and go get a cup of coffee and come back and the photo would be displayed. I was kind of bummed out about that. I don’t really want to carry around every picture I’ve ever taken on my laptop. I back them up and everything, but I really wanted to move everything over to the Mac if possible.
Well a couple weeks ago I picked up a LaCie external 160 GB Hard Drive. It’s the one custom made for the Mini. Looks like this:
Turns out that will all my stuff on the mini, I had less than 10 GB free on the existing HD. It would often go less if I was doing some DVD stuff. So I installed the LaCie and move just about every piece of content – music, photos, backups, videos, over to the external disk. The main disk now has about 55 GB free.
So I figured I’d fire up iPhoto again and see what happened. Not bad. It was actually just about as zippy as PhotoElements on the PC. Not quite as many features, but fine for cataloging. If I need to do any real editing, I can bring it over to the PC and PhotoShop.
Then I heard that iPhoto 6 had some good speed enhancements. So I just installed that. Very nice. I love the full screen editing. I wish Apple would put IPTC metadata into iPhoto, but I found some applescripts that will allow me to copy over my IPTC tags to iPhoto keywords. I’ll report how that goes.
And my next big purchase may be a 1 Gig memory chip. I’ve already done the unspeakable and cracked open the mini a while back to install a 512 MB chip I had sitting around.