PC for photo editing

forgotmyname

Even a 20 year old PC will edit photo's. Just the difference between waiting 4 seconds to apply a texture to waiting 20
or 30 seconds.

The money should probably be spent on backup solutions. No good spending hours editing a photo and losing it
because a drive failed.

a

p00 said:I only have an old laptop which takes 20 minutes to even open anything up. I will be online learning so would need a reasonable computer anyway and I have a large smart tv in the spare room which could be a monitor unless I get an all in one. I'm fairly sure this will be my last computer purchase.

A bit shocked that Neil_Jones did not suggest an SSD in his post, but you can get a 500GB for around £56 from amazon to make it boot much faster. You have not stated the make, model or spec, but probably do well with one. My daily use laptop is 8 years old and still cant fault it.

TheRightOne

forgotmyname said:

Even a 20 year old PC will edit photo's. Just the difference between waiting 4 seconds to apply a texture to waiting 20
or 30 seconds.

The money should probably be spent on backup solutions. No good spending hours editing a photo and losing it
because a drive failed.

Twenty years old? Really? I don't think so. Would be a veritable nightmare. Twenty seconds? More like twenty minutes.

Back up solutions? How much would they cost? I feel that you are over egging the pudding.

Farway

forgotmyname said:

The money should probably be spent on backup solutions. No good spending hours editing a photo and losing it
because a drive failed.

To hammer it home, reported this week

Adobe is offering its condolences to customers after an update to its Lightroom photo manager permanently deleted troves of snaps on people's iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/21/adobe_lightroom_data_wipe/

p00

Cisco001 said:

Are you after pre-built desktop?
Is your £1000 for full set up or tower only?

Yes a ready built ready to go pc.  Could be tower only as I have the smart tv for a screen and wireless keyboard and mouse in the drawer.
I'm just not sure the lowest spec I should go and the sales people in Currys simply suggested no lower than i7.  Then tried to sell me the most expensive machine
X

p00

photodgm said:

Without a little more information it is difficult to be very helpful. Photography is rarely a money saving hobby. Are you intending to follow a structured online course or pick up information from a number of online tutorials? What is your ambition with regard to photography? Is it to learn how to better use an existing camera and do a little lightening, darkening and cropping of the resultant photos? Is it to take RAW images heavily processing them, merging and stacking them to produce highly detailed and crafted images? Are you going to want to print the final images? Is it that you want a new desktop computer and you want to be sure that as well as other things it can be used for photo editing?

Yes your last sentence is correct. If I'm buying a new computer I want it to be able to do anything I want plus good enough for photo editing. It wont be highly detailed stuff but I may want to print if I'm good enough.
I dont want to buy the wrong pc then need something extra. I wont be gaming.
X

forgotmyname

TheRightOne said:

Twenty years old? Really? I don't think so. Would be a veritable nightmare. Twenty seconds? More like twenty minutes.

Back up solutions? How much would they cost? I feel that you are over egging the pudding.

You may think so and benchmarks may agree, but in real life you maybe surprised how little difference it makes. Video
encoding yes but photo's not really anywhere near the same overheads.  Unless doing batch work on many thousands
of photo's at the same time.

I was running windows 7 as the main OS and windows 10 in a VM enviroment on a dual core Athlon machine. Worked fine.

Comes down to what software and what are you actually doing to the photo's?

TheRightOne

forgotmyname said:

TheRightOne said:

Twenty years old? Really? I don't think so. Would be a veritable nightmare. Twenty seconds? More like twenty minutes.

Back up solutions? How much would they cost? I feel that you are over egging the pudding.

You may think so and benchmarks may agree, but in real life you maybe surprised how little difference it makes. Video
encoding yes but photo's not really anywhere near the same overheads.  Unless doing batch work on many thousands
of photo's at the same time.

I was running windows 7 as the main OS and windows 10 in a VM enviroment on a dual core Athlon machine. Worked fine.

Comes down to what software and what are you actually doing to the photo's?

Dual core Athlon is not twenty years old. If you stated perhaps up to thirteen years old, I might not have objected. But twenty? No.
I'm actually writing this on a dual core Athlon.

forgotmyname

High end CPU from the year 2000 could easily be used to edit photo's even to this day, just needs enough RAM.

I used my AMD machine until fairly recently also, only upgraded when i was doing more CAD stuff and the Ryzen
got released. Editing a 120MB file with over 2 million triangles took a while, even with 8 cores/16threads it
can still take a while.

TheRightOne

forgotmyname said:

High end CPU from the year 2000 could easily be used to edit photo's even to this day, just needs enough RAM.

I used my AMD machine until fairly recently also, only upgraded when i was doing more CAD stuff and the Ryzen
got released. Editing a 120MB file with over 2 million triangles took a while, even with 8 cores/16threads it
can still take a while.

Nope.
Typical CPU from 2000:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+1.50GHz&id=1053



No photo editing would be taking place with that. 

Add in the sobering effect of PC-100 or PC-133 RAM and you'll be happy to even view a photo, let alone edit it.