Expression Media 2

[Doug]

I just started running EM2 today and instantly noticed a speed increase over iView 3.1.3. I would never have been tempted to move over to EM if it weren't for continual kernel panics when launching iView under Leopard 10.5.2. Ditto Dierk: the icons are horrid.

[ralphpaonessa]

I just started running EM2 today and instantly noticed a speed increase over iView 3.1.3.

In what ways are you finding EM2 faster?

Trying it under Windows Vista and browsing through my images, I found that full-size previews of DNG files took about 3 seconds to render, versus 0.5 second for IVMP. And PSD files are taking about 12 seconds, versus 3 seconds in IVMP.

I upgraded hoping to see some speed improvements. The program does seem zippier in some aspects; but the slow media rendering is very disappointing, and has caused me to go back to IVMP for now.

[jimtron]

Anyone know how many images EM2 can have without crashing or getting very sluggish?

- Jim

[peterkrogh]

Jim,
First thing to watch is catalog size - keep well under the 1.8 GB limit for the catalog.  Rebuild preview at a lower quality if you need to save space.

As to nuber of items, part of the question has to do with what part of the software you're using.  Running a "find" will start to slow down at 25,000 or so, IIRC.  Other functions - like clicking between catalog sets - should not get much slower at all.

My largest catalogs have about 60,000 images in them, and are okay in speed for everything by "find".
Peter

[ralphpaonessa]

Trying it under Windows Vista and browsing through my images, I found that full-size previews of DNG files took about 3 seconds to render, versus 0.5 second for IVMP. And PSD files are taking about 12 seconds, versus 3 seconds in IVMP.

I upgraded hoping to see some speed improvements. The program does seem zippier in some aspects; but the slow media rendering is very disappointing, and has caused me to go back to IVMP for now.

I'm updating my comments above. I've since switched from IVMP to EM (Windows Vista). After installing the Ardfry DNG Codec ($30) my DNG previews are very fast. PSD previews are still slow (3-10 seconds depending on file size), but I decided to live with that. I suppose it's too much to hope that Adobe will release a PSD codec for Windows, so we can see their thumbnails in folders and faster previews in EM.

[johnbeardy]

Isn't that a disadvantage of PSD, that it's more proprietary than TIF? I don't see any benefits from saving as PSD.

John