Waiting for the Watched Pot

Over the past few days I have been loading my photos (and Videos) from SD card onto my photographic laptop and timing how long it takes to load using various software packages. Its a lot like watching a pot to boil (yes the old adage is “A watched pot never boils”) it does but it takes a long time. At first the results didn’t make a lot of sense, The number of files or combined file size didn’t seem to relate to the time taken. Clearly Picasa was fastest and Lightroom 5 Beta (LR5b) was generally slowest, with Photo Mechanic (PM) and Lightroom 4.4 (LR4.4) occasionally taking the longest. This didn’t make a lot of sense because whilst a lot of folk seem to complain LR4.4 is slow, many have suggested that LR5b and PM are much faster. I suspect they are faster for JPEG and Cannon’s RAW format .CR2 but they don’t perform so well with .mov or pentax’s RAW format .PEF, then I realised there was a serious flaw in my testing. The cards I used in the two cameras were rated for different speeds, You can tell from the little number inside the circle that should be printed on the SD cards label. My Canon was loaded with a 10 (10mb/sec) but the Pentax was only a 6 (6MB/sec), clearly this has had the biggest effect on the results but like watching the pot I’ve lost interest in trying to be scientific and fair. I just need to only use SD cards rated 10 and load my photos onto my computer using picasa. Enough time has been wasted already!

Number & Size	camera	Type of files	picasa	PM	LR4.4	LR5b
52(640mb)	canon	.jpg .cr2	25	37
215(1.7GB)	pentax	.jpg .pef	32	75	80	73
11(1.13gb)	Canon	.mov	35	36	75	111
134(1.4GB)	pentax	.jpg .pef	42	54	104
184(2.4GB)	pentax	.jpg .pef	57	100	102	129
8(889mb)	Canon	.mov	28	53	86	103
13(286)	Pentax	.jpg .pef	6	22		19
72(920mb)	pentax	.jpg .pef	18		58.9	73
3(69mb)	Canon	.mov	7		15	22