Mac Air M4 16gb or 24gb on back up and travel computer.

[LDMPhotography]

I have Mac Studio M2 32gb ram for most of my editing, but look at getting a Mac Air M4 and have 2 choices 16gb and 1tb ssd or 24 gb and 512 ssd.

This will be used mainly for travel might do a little bit of editing while watching TV etc, Lightroom is my editing tool and I shoot 128mb I ages Sony A7rv uncompressed,

My question is will 16 gb of ram perform for what I want, the reason I would like 1tb ssd is more space to down load to when away from home. I don’t do video and if every photo stacking would be on my Studio 1 at home.

How much faster would would the 24gb be compared to the 16 gb?

 

[Abbott Schindler]

This is tough: ideally you'd want both RAM and disk capacity. Keep in mind that you can always bring along an external SSD if you need more storage (I carry a couple of SanDisk SSDs: one for photos and one for backup, as I always want at least 2 copies of my photos regardless of whether I format my CFe cards). But you can't add memory.

I'd probably go for the SSD in your case for a couple of reasons. First, from what I've read, Apple's internal SSDs are faster than TB4/USB-C/etc. external drives. At least in the case of your Mac Studio, perhaps at least twice as fast—I assume there's something similar with the MBA. Second, I've found it too easy to consume internal storage, especially if you're running Time Machine on a portable. Reason: on the portable, Time Machine stores its backups on the device until your external Time Machine volume is connected (at which time the internal TM data is largely purged as it's written to external disk).

The latter bit me shortly after I got my M2 MBP and was on a trip. I'd forgotten how TM worked, and had turned it on for that machine, which has 1 TB of storage. I had ~300GB of photos (plus lots of other data) on the machine and was running low on storage. I transferred the photos to my external SSD and "erased" them from the internal. To my surprise, the machine showed no change in available capacity! Then I remembered TM, turned it off, and instantly had all the free space I'd expected.

Ever since then, I've carried a 1 TB SSD with me and used it for CCC backups while on the road—no Time Machine, no problem (and an external disk is more of my concept of "backup" than just saving the old data on the same internal disk).

As for 16 GB: macOS will keep Memory Pressure reasonable regardless of how much memory you have. If you're just doing light editing and aren't in a rush, 16 will do you fine. If you start running low, just quit programs you're not using. My machines have 16-64GB of memory and all of them seem to run happily using about half of the available, and I don't notice much performance hit. Video's a bit different, but routine Raw files (mine are 65MB) aren't a problem.

 

[Jeff Wahaus]

I have Mac Studio M2 32gb ram for most of my editing, but look at getting a Mac Air M4 and have 2 choices 16gb and 1tb ssd or 24 gb and 512 ssd.

This will be used mainly for travel might do a little bit of editing while watching TV etc, Lightroom is my editing tool and I shoot 128mb I ages Sony A7rv uncompressed,

My question is will 16 gb of ram perform for what I want, the reason I would like 1tb ssd is more space to down load to when away from home. I don’t do video and if every photo stacking would be on my Studio 1 at home.

I would definitely get the 1TB SSD over an additional 8GB of RAM. With the OS and Apps installed a 512GB drive is only going to have about 300GB or less of storage left and can fill up quickly.

How much faster would would the 24gb be compared to the 16 gb?

99% of the time you will see no difference in speed.

 

[NicholasD]

I have Mac Studio M2 32gb ram for most of my editing, but look at getting a Mac Air M4 and have 2 choices 16gb and 1tb ssd or 24 gb and 512 ssd.

This will be used mainly for travel might do a little bit of editing while watching TV etc, Lightroom is my editing tool and I shoot 128mb I ages Sony A7rv uncompressed,

My question is will 16 gb of ram perform for what I want, the reason I would like 1tb ssd is more space to down load to when away from home. I don’t do video and if every photo stacking would be on my Studio 1 at home.

How much faster would would the 24gb be compared to the 16 gb?

Based on proposed use and priorities, I'd go for 1TB and 24 GB. If you were going to do extensive editing or hammer on current denoising applications, I'd want more ram.

FYI, I have a somewhat similar setup - M3 Mac Air, 16 GB with 512 GB storage. Nice small package on the road. Photographically, it's used for copying files onto something besides an SD card, initial culling, and perhaps some basic preliminary edits. But I know everything will end up on a Studio desktop which is my primary machine.

I know this is somewhat against the accepted logic (load up on ram first - you can always add SSD storage), but given how I use the machine, it works just fine.

Nick

 

[Zeee]

I just picked up an Air M3 with 24GB in January. I have never gotten more than 256GB on my travel Macs. I have never gotten mote than 512GB on my desktops. All the files live on external drives. Powered for the desktop and portable for the Air. Neither have ever been more than half full.

I got 24GB RAM for LrC's Denoise. It cut the processing time in half compared to my 2020 M1, 16GB.

I did get 512GB with the latest Air because I would have had to order the 256GB and it would had of arrived too late before I went on a two month trip. First time I ever stored files on the internal drive so it did fill up a bit. I backed up the files to the external drive using Caron Copy Cloner.

I find Apple is little pricy for RAM but I'm a hobby shooter. If I was a working pro or liked to take tens of thousands of shots like my friend it might be different. These days I'm pretty picky and a lot of files don't get past my first cull.

 

[Zeee]

I just picked up an Air M3 with 24GB in January. I have never gotten more than 256GB on my travel Macs. I have never gotten mote than 512GB on my desktops. All the files live on external drives. Powered for the desktop and portable for the Air. Neither have ever been more than half full.

I got 24GB RAM for LrC's Denoise. It cut the processing time in half compared to my 2020 M1, 16GB.

I did get 512GB with the latest Air because I would have had to order the 256GB and it would had of arrived too late before I went on a two month trip. First time I ever stored files on the internal drive so it did fill up a bit. I backed up the files to the external drive using Caron Copy Cloner.

I find Apple is little pricy for RAM but I'm a hobby shooter. If I was a working pro or liked to take tens of thousands of shots like my friend it might be different. These days I'm pretty picky and a lot of files don't get past my first cull.

I just checked and from my last trip I had about 100GB worth of files. The M3 is currently about 94GB so about 200GB when I got back. I use LrC and Adobe recommends 20% of free space. I try to keep it at 100GB which is an unofficial rule of thumb. I always have at least 100GB open.

 

[wilberforce_1]

I have a 16GB M1 Pro and use Lightroom to process Nikon Z8 files , which are a bit smaller than your Sony files. Based on this I personally would choose 24GB ram and deal with the smaller ssd storage. Reason is I am sometimes in yellow memory pressure, and your files are even bigger. Adobe apps are bigs hogs of unified memory.

However if you really need the larger ssd then you can certainly get by with 16GB ram. Apple does a very good job managing swap storage on the fast internal ssd.

Less storage also tends to encourage one to have more discipline and thoughtfulness about number of shots taken/kept. However, if you do things like birds in flight or sports, you may need to take thousands of shots to capture those decisive moments!

 

[Lettermanian]

I highly recommend upping the ram to 24GB if you will be doing any kind of batch processing of multiple files (i.e. for timelapses, colour edits, etc). While I don't use LR, I have done batch processing in DXO Filmpack 7 and Luminar Neo (my current software), and ON1 Photo Raw (in the past), and each time the ram used while processing goes over 16GB on my M2 Mac Mini 24/512.

 

[EJ Fudd]

I have the M3 15inch 24 gig version. no issues for light editing or more. use R5, R5 II and Fujifilm x-h2 shoot raw

 

[graybalanced]

How much faster would would the 24gb be compared to the 16 gb?

Adding RAM never speeds up a computer...unless there is a bottleneck related to RAM because there isn't enough for the given tasks. Once there is enough RAM for the given tasks, no amount of additional RAM will speed it up. That is the only benefit of adding RAM, to remove all potential memory bottlenecks. The job is to determine where that tipping point is for the given tasks. At what point does adding more expensive RAM not make any more difference at all.

On Macs, 8GB now falls into the zone where a bottleneck and slowdown is likely for photo editing. 16GB is enough for many people. 24GB and up provides some insurance. Above 48GB, almost no one sees improved performance for basic photo editing, only for images with huge numbers of pixels stacked with many Photoshop layers.

This will be used mainly for travel might do a little bit of editing while watching TV etc, Lightroom is my editing tool and I shoot 128mb I ages Sony A7rv uncompressed,

16GB might work for that if edits are relatively light, and you are not assembling them into panoramas or HDRs where there must be enough memory to hold multiple images in RAM at once. However, because you shoot large raw files, 24GB would work better.

If you left out the editing of the 128MB raw files, you could probably get away with 16GB for a non-primary computer. On a budget 16GB might be OK. If the laptop was only used for travel image backup and light editing, 16GB would probably be all that was needed.

 

[Rainy_diary]

Does 16 GB is enough if I opened both lightroom and capture one ?

 

[Philip Eihuyar]

Does 16 GB is enough if I opened both lightroom and capture one ?

If it were me, I would consider the small increase in cost for (what I consider) the necessary amount of RAM worth it. Choose the 24 GB RAM. Memory swapping works fine but at the expense of using up the lifetime of your SSD.

 

[Rainy_diary]

I finally got MacBook Air M4 24 GB Ram

When I opened both lightroom and capture One it doesn't use swap files.