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Cant get it working

Answered
Patrick Curry

I have had a terrible time with this software!

 

Migrated many photos to On1. It is so slow sometimes taking many minutes to complete a simple task. It took a couple of weeks to do the migration seemingly working in the background.

 

It has made my Mac useless as it hogs pretty much all the memory. LR6 worked perfectly well and was quite zippy on my machine.

 

I just don't know where to go expcetpt to try some other piece of software. I have explained all of this to the Helpdesk and sent logs etc. but nothing seems to have any effect.

 

I thought this was going to be a solution to not using Adobe but it does not seem so.

 

Just wondering what others thought.

 

Patrick

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Comments

5 comments

Date Votes
  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    You haven’t told us anything about your system. Which Mac are you running and what are its specs? How is it set up as far as external devices go? Which OS version?

    I run it on an M1 mini with 16 GB of RAM. My photos are in an external SSD and I have another for the program’s Scratch space and the PerfectBrowseCache. I have no problems with performance. I have edited files over 1TB in size.

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  • Patrick Curry

    Model Name: iMac
    Model Identifier: iMac18,3
    Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Core i5
    Processor Speed: 3.5 GHz
    Number of Processors: 1
    Total Number of Cores: 4
    L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
    L3 Cache: 6 MB
    Memory: 32 GB
    Boot ROM Version: 451.140.1.0.0
    SMC Version (system): 2.41f2

    Mac Catalina

     

    'My photos are in an external SSD and I have another for the program’s Scratch space and the PerfectBrowseCache'

    I do not know what any of this means.

    I have been running LR for years without any lag. Now my machine will not run any other software while ON1 is running. I simply do not understand how it can take all of the resources of my Mac when LR ran very smoothly indeed.

    Many thanks

     

    Patrick

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Lightroom and Photo RAW work differently and they place entirely different demands upon your system. Photo RAW is much more graphics intensive making more use of the GPU than does Lightroom. Comparing their performance is an apples vs oranges comparison.

    You are running a 6 year old system with an equally old GPU on the oldest OS the program is able to run on. I would expect it to be a bit slow. ON1 PHOTO RAW 2023 Technical Requirements 

    When you open a RAW file for editing in Photo RAW the raw data is analyzed by the various AIs for noise reduction, sharpening, and the Mask AI feature. All that happens before the data is demosaiced into a viewable RGB image that can be displayed onscreen. I imagine the GPU is struggling to meet those demands.

    I recommend you quit all the other programs you have running in the background when you use Photo RAW. The only program I keep running while editing is Mail.

    "My photos are…" This is about performance enhancements I've made to my system. My photos are on an external SSD. This removes them from the boot drive with all the OS and background program I/O demands placed upon it. The photos will load a bit faster as they have their own I/O channel to use.

    The program will make use of Scratch space when memory gets tight. I have moved that space to another external SSD, again for I/O contention reasons. It also creates the PerfectBrowseCache folder to hold all the preview images for your Catalog folders. It also contains the database files needed to manage all of that. It can grow to be quite large and will grow without limit. Putting it on the dedicated Scratch drive leaves me plenty of room for growth.

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  • Patrick Curry

    Thank you Brian for these explanations. I find the material on On1 very limited and there seems to be no way of knowing what the program is doing outside a small browse bar and Activity monitor. One can't even tell if / when it is doing something far less what is going on under the hood. After over a month my Activity Monitor often reads over 300% which means the computer is good for nothing else.

    I take exception though about my system being old and there being no direct comparison between LR and On1. I would assert that On1 directly markets the programme as a LIghtroom replacement as do the many articles on the net comparing the two.

    Had I known that this would have been the outcome I certainly would have not even considered it and I would suggest to anyone who may be thinking of changing - DON'T.

    There is no joy for me in this and even considering using the programme should come with a warning - Only use on the very latest machine with the latest OS and souped up specs. Nowhere when I read about the programme did I get this impression, and it seems like false advertising to me at the very least.

    Thank you again for the information. At least now I am able to realise that it is never going to work for me.

    Regards

    Patrick

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator
    • Edited

    Personally, I think the company's specs for running the program are too loose. Yes, it is running on your system which does meet the specs but it clearly isn't performing as well as one would like.

    How long have you had the software? It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. If you have been working with support from the beginning and have the email to back it up, you _may_ be able to get them to extend that period. Use the same Submit a request link only choose the Customer Service option to request a refund.

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