PhotoLab 7 Elite owner on a Windows 10 machine. (2018, i7-7700, 32 GB of RAM, GTX1070, everything’s running off of internal SSDs — Definitely older, but not a potato.) It offers such stellar results, but it’s incredibly slow. Everything chugs along and it makes editing a very painful process. Capture One flies through the same files instantaneously. Even Lightroom 6 processes faster.
I’ve also tried it on my Surface Pro 6. It’s a weaker machine for sure, and it accordingly performs way, way worse. It takes minutes before images even load. It feels like PL might just be slow on older machines (or Windows as a whole?).
A M4 Max MacBook is in my future, but until then, I’m debating on whether or not PhotoLab 8 is a good investment now or if I should hold off until I get new hardware.
Do you folks know if 8 has seen marked performance improvements on older Windows hardware? Is PhotoLab much smoother and faster on Apple Silicon?
How many megagpixels on your camera sensor? My current camera has a 21 megapixel sensor. My machine is Windows 10 with an I7-6700 processor and, until I upgraded to a RTX 4060 for PhotoLab 8, I was using the GTX 1050ti. for PL 7. In other words, my machine is lower spec’d than yours and PL7 always ran everything fast except for DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD exports. Exporting using DeepPRIME took around 15 seconds and DeepPRIME XD took around 30 seconds. All other features averaged between 1 and 3 seconds to complete. Start up around took 9-10 seconds before everything was loaded. What do you mean by slow? can you give us some examples?
Overall performance with PL 8 is general similar to PL 7 but there have been a couple of performance tweaks…
My pc has an i5 9600kf, 32 gig, ssd and gtx 1660 super. A little faster than yours, but this was a budget build in 2020 so it isn’t fast by today’s standards.
PL8 runs very quickly on this machine, where On1 (for example) is sluggish.
Not sure if this is helpful info or not! I woudnt expect pl8 to run faster than pl7 on your machine though.
I run PL7 and now PL8 with Nikon D850 files on two older window machines with Windows 11:
AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with Radeon Graphics (wich is not used / supportet by PL)
Intel i7-8750H with Nvidia Geoforce GTX1060
On PL7 the image browser is really slow: You see the reading of the file, apply the preset, calculating the preview and at last showing the labels. If there are a lot of files to read it needs a long time.
This is noticeably improved in PL8.
However, the reading from external hard disks is again very slow, no matter how fast the disk is.
The normal edits are ok in PL7, but the calculation of the “Full preview in progress …” is really slow.
This was also extremely improved in PL8.
Working in PL8 is really much smoother. You have to wait less.
The export of calculation-intensive processing (XD/XD2s) is not significantly faster in PL8, which I don’t find so bad because I don’t have to sit in front of it and wait for the end.
When it comes to editing, an update to PL8 is definitely worthwhile.
Same procesor as Mark above: i7 6700K overclocked to 4.4 Ghz, plus 32 GB of RAM, RTX 3070 card and Samsung 960 EVO SSD, on Windows 10.
I noticed a significant improvement in performance from PL7 to 8: not so much in normal tasks, but in the fact that 8 does not slow down at all after it’s been in use for a certain time. I recently processed 700 images in a row, and it NEVER slowed down like 7 used to. With 7, I had to close and reopen it once in a while to restore performance.
With Black Friday on the doorstep, I’d hold buying PhotoLab 8. You can then always see how the discounts are for an upgrade from 7 to 8 or a new license.
I do just that and then either upgrade DPL6 to DPL8 or get a new license.
As for Intel vs. Apple Silicon: I tested DPL-6, -7 and -8 on macOS on an 8-core i9 iMac and a M1 8/8/16 MacBook Air from 2019 and 2020 respectively - and the low-end MBA performed at least as well as the i9 at a fraction of the electric power.
I have a W10 computer with i7-6700 (7 years old), 16 GB of RAM and my photos are on a NAS through an EGB link. My system is on a SSD and, for export purpose, I have a NVIDIA GTX 1060 inside the box.
I have speeded the display by this, in French (Sorry, nobody’s perfect)
Menu système
Paramètres graphiques
⇒ Activer l’accélération matérielle
Then add “DX0 Photolab 7” to the list.
This is all enormously helpful, thank you! It makes me think there’s something wrong with my machine(s).
I’m working with files from multiple cameras:
Canon 5D II
Canon 6D II
Fuji X100T
Fuji X100VI
Ricoh GR III.
Gut check, it’s the Canon files that seem to chug the most, and those are 21/26 megapixels respectively. Surface tests would have been with the 6D II as that’s what I was using for clients. (Mind you, I haven’t done a hard test in a while. I’ve been avoiding opening PL7 because of the sloooooow grind.)
You’ve given me lots to work with here and I’m so glad to hear about the improvements in 8 — especially the full previews.
I’ll keep poking around and I’ll report back if I find any good news. Thanks all!
Strange. I use Canon gear (1D4, 5D, 5D3, M6 and R7) and they don’t grind with DPL 7.10 at all - neither with DPL on Intel-Mac nor on Apple Silicon. I mostly work with folders containing less than 100 image files though. DPL can’t handle well all folders with several hundreds or thousands of images.
I also regularly delete the database because it can get out of sync with what’s actually stored on the drive. A fresh DB can speed things up.
I’m a photo hobbyist. I essentially have the same setup as you do, only differing in that I have the GTX4060. Got that card because the PSU was rated at 400W and the card only used about 115W. The HP TE-01xxxx core usually runs at 95-115F PC. Going from a fixed-in motherboard graphics (intel 630) to the GTX made a whole world difference in how fast PL 7 Elite became. My only issue with PL is do I get the BF upgrade deal, or wait for PL9. At this moment, I’m leaning towards waiting for PL9.
If desktop works for you, the M4 Mac Mini 10-core version with 32GB RAM is a workhorse faster than the original M1 Max. You can buy one for €1059 with 256GB built-in drive and add a 4TB external drive for €250 with case. You can boot from the external drive and you have the performance equivalent of a €3000 to €4000 MBP. AppleCare is a lot cheaper on Mac Minis as well.
PhotoLab runs very well on the config above. It should run fast though on your i7 + GTX1050. There’s an issue, probably with your drive configuration. PhotoLab is very weird about drives (it’s always complaining when drives are added and taken away on macOS, throwing a kind of error claiming to be incompatible with external drives, which is also not true).
I occasionally had messages of drive compatibility issues, but not during the last few years. Apart from the DB maintenance issues, I find PhotoLab to be fairly robust. Maybe this coincides with me deleting the DB regularly, while I used to keep the DB before.
I’m using PL 7 (and 8) on a Macbook Air M3 16GB RAM machine, with images from a 24MP Sony a7iii. I’m impressed with PL’s performance. Even a heavily-edited photo with noise reduction typically exports to JPG in under 10 sec. Sometimes it may go to 15 sec.I’ve got my RAW files on a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD, and export to the Mac SSD.
I’ve got a Sony A7RV on order. When I get it, I’ll find out how it works on BIG files.
I use an Intel 8th Gen Core i7 8700 3.2GHz CPU and the crucial change was upgrading to an RTX3050 8GB which dramatically improved the performance in PL compared with my older card (4GB). Like another poster, I chose it so I did not have to upgrade the power supply, and because it was effectively fanless and silent at my levels of usage (ie no processing of video). I find its performance with 42 MP files perfectly acceptable, whereas I did not with my previous card. I am assuming that the options in PL for what tasks to perform on the GPU have been set optimally. The other crucial thing is to be using a fast SSD for the files that are being processed.
My understanding (I am no expert) is that strength of the Mac is processing power per unit of electricity. If I get the opportunity I will do a careful test with PL7 on both my PC and on my M2 Max Mac. I have never been conscious of much difference but my usage of the two machines is so different (work versus hobby) that this does not mean much. If I get the chance I will do a more systematic test and could post the results. I should also download the trial version of PL8 before hoping for a good Black Friday deal on upgrades.
A couple of people have mentioned periodic deleting of the database. How does one do this, and what do you lose by doing so? Is everything, including keywords and projects included in the dop files that are presumably used when it creates a new database?
Yes, everything is in the combination of .dop and .xmp files. One has to set the preferences correctly before deleting the database. Always set your preferences to write data out to the sidecar files. Someone else will wander by with screenshots and detailed instructions.
As far as I know, some workflow related information can be lost depending on whether DPL for Mac or Win was used.
Projects are lost on both Mac and Win platforms
History entries come back, but detailed set of steps can turn into “loaded sidecar”, as I’ve just seen testing with DPL 7.10 on macOS. I also got “imported sidecar” which was expandable and contained all steps.
I rarely use history and projects nowadays and think of those entries as lost with the database delete.
Thank you for this answer. I am pretty sure I did check the option to save to sidecar files, though I guess that may only affect edits/changes made after opting in, so I guess I should take a backup of the database in case I need to restore it, as I cannot remember how long ago I switched the option on.
I would never depend on history and have never used the projects feature. Damn the DAM features. I just want a RAW processor. And into the bundle, DxO has added an excellent retouching system (which was pretty creaky back in PhotoLab 2/3/4). I underestimated what DxO could do with bitmap retouching on RAW files.
