CarmenRM

Ok, sounds good. Thank you!

I'm planning on renting the Epson V850 Pro, if you recommend doing prints, as I have other prints that I need to scan that I don't want to send out. If you recommend negatives, I'm thinking I'll send them to a scanning service, as I have some bizzaro sized negatives and no holders for them. I'll ask for tiff files and 48 bit scanning, but a question about the resolution -- they offer scanning at resolutions of 1200, 2400 and 3600 DPI. The smallest negatives are about an inch square, the largest about 2x4 inches. I know you recommend 1200PPI for items 2x3 inches and smaller. Should I be asking for higher resolution scans? I'm planning on making photo books, and the largest images I would do is likely 8x10.

I've inherited my grandparents' photo collections and have images that are both in negative and print form. Am I better to scan the negative or the print? (I did do a search to see if this was answered elsewhere in the forum, but no luck. My apologies if you've answered this before!) I see from looking at some of the photo restoration posts that having a negative is preferred. But, after reading your articles on on resolution and the size of digital files, I don't understand how starting out with a much smaller negative is the better way to go, when the file size of the scan ends up being smaller than 6MP. I think I'm missing something on the interaction between resolution and the number of megapixels an image file has? Thank you for your time and help!

Ok, will do! Thanks!!

Hi Brian, I took the plunge and bought an iMac based on your specs - thank you! Also bought 32GB of Crucial RAM...but foolishly didn’t double-check that it would come in two sticks and instead only have a single stick (bah!). Can I still install this single stick and everything will be fine, or do I definitely need 2 sticks of 16GB?

Yup, read the article, just wanted confirmation. Thanks for the other info!

Whoops, forgot — the camera I’m using now is 16MP, and if I decide to upgrade (not for a good while, need to recover from the cost of the iMac LOL) will likely be 20MP. Not sure of this makes a difference.

Hi Brian, I’m just about ready to buy a new iMac, finally! I’m working through your pinned iMac Configurations post but I’m wondering: would you recommend different specs for the iMac 27” for Photoshop Elements 2020 (rather than Photoshop CC 2020)? I’m not aiming to use PS CC so I’m hoping it’s possible to save a few Canadian bucks by being able to go to lower specs on the iMac. I’ll still be using (and I’ve checked that these are all compatible with Catalina…and hopefully Big Sur): Adobe Bridge Fujitsu Scansnap iX500 for document scanning possibly an Epson flatbed scanner (Perfection v500 Photo) the Spyder X Pro calibrator that you recommend Memories Suite (layout software for photo books) Plus others, but I think? these are the more intensive hardware/software that I’ll need a computer to handle. One more question — I’ve kept all my EHDs to the 75% full or less rule ? but I’m wondering if I should partition the EHDs with Time Machine backups (so that it’s only possible to fill it to 75% before TM starts overwriting old backups). Or should I delete old backups myself? Thanks for time and help! Carmen

Sigh, I was afraid you'd say that. Glad to hear there's a solution though, lol! Thanks!!

Hello! I originally posted this yesterday in the Bridge Class forum and Damien answered my question at the bottom about what happens when I purge the cache in Bridge. Can you help/have any ideas with the other issue I'm having? I have a Mac laptop running Sierra 10.12.6 and Elements 14. It is 7 years old, and has 8GB of RAM. Its hard drive has 621GB free out of 1000GB. The last time I shut down was last night. I run CleanMyMac about once a month. I have my images archived on a 5TB external hard drive (that has 3.45TB available) and am viewing those images using Bridge. The images are organized into folders by year and often can contain several thousand images. My problem is that the CPU load (that I'm viewing using CleanMyMac) goes up to 85% (and sometimes higher) while Bridge is generating thumbnails and previews, and as a result my Mac is heating up quite quickly (up to 75 deg C, according to CleanMyMac) until the generating process is done, which for a larger folder that I looked at this morning (3500 files) took about 9 minutes. Is it the size of the folders that's causing the problem? Or the age/RAM of my Mac? Both? I've double-checked that I have my Bridge preferences settings as per Damien's recommendations in the class. Would the free up RAM memory feature of CleanMyMac help? I did try viewing another folder after hitting the Free Up button but it didn't seem to improve the situation or the time it took to do. I'm thinking that in order to reduce the amount of time it's taking to generate thumbnails and previews, I should split the large folders into a series of smaller subfolders, each with a much lesser amount of images in them. I have the cache purge currently set to 30 days; I'm afraid I don't understand exactly what will happen if I go back to a folder I haven't viewed in over 30 days...will those thumbnails and previews have to be generated again when I go back to that folder? Thanks for your time and help!

Hi again...finally LOL! It is done. Ha, that turned into a marathon, eh? Busy summer turned a week's work into three. Thank you again for the information and advice -- I now have all my images on those two 5TB EHDs, which freed up my Mac to 630 GB of 1TB free And I also have two Time Machine backups...I was hoping for a third but that 8 year old EHD bit the dust. I'll get another 2TB EHD when cash flow is more optimistic than it is presently, so the two for now will do. Cheers! Carmen

Whoops, sorry, I think I wasn't clear on that first question. Or I don't understand your reply...? For background: my Mac laptop has 1TB SATA drive. Not all my image files will fit on it, so I have three EHDs that have TM backups of my Mac (two 1TB, one 2TB in capacity), as well as three EHDs that has all the image files that don't fit on my Mac (all three EHDs are 1TB in capacity). These three sets allow me to have one backup at home and two offsite. The only thing is...the 1TB EHDS are all nearly full. And the 1TB internal HD on my Mac has only 150GB left of capacity too. So I nearly had a heart attack when I read the rule in your previous posts that the EHDs and the internal HD on the Mac should be only at 65% capacity. (YIKES I had no idea!) So to fix my problem, I've bought two 5TB EHDs. Ideally I'd like to keep doing the three sets of backups thing. That means that I would have (I was thinking): - two 5TB EHDs that have a TM backup and the image files that don't live on my Mac - one 2TB EHD that has the image files that don't live on my Mac - one 1TB EHD that has a TM backup (And I'll clean up the Mac so that the TM backups are within the reasonable limit!) So I'm not really backing up the EHD to itself...I can see that happening if you have all your image files living on your Mac, and then, copying those same image files is redundant. Crikey, I hope I've explained myself. Apologies if I haven't! Clear as mud indeed?? And thanks for the info about the verification -- there's no way to do all of them of course, so I generally just check a few files (that they'll open with no problems) and be done with it.

Hello! Is there an app/some other automated way of checking whether there are any corrupted files in a large batch of files? Just to make sure that all the files are in good shape after copying them to my external hard drive and so that I can safely delete them off my Mac. Also, I've read in your past posts that you like to keep your Time Machine backups on a separate EHD from those that you use for your image files. It made me curious -- are there any concerns with having Time Machine backups and other files on the same EHD? Thanks in advance!