How much RAM for photo editing?

[Martin A]

I am finally ordering parts for my new, dedicated image editing computer. I primarily use ON1 Photo Raw and work occasionally in PhotoShop. I also am scanning years of transparencies and b&w negatives and printing on a wide format printer. I would like to know how much RAM you have in your machine, how much you feel is necessary, and how much you would like to have if you were spec'ing a new machine for yourself.

[stuck]

...how much RAM you have in your machine, how much you feel is necessary, and how much you would like to have if you were spec'ing a new machine for yourself.

Regardless of what the PC is going to be used for, I've never known a PC that doesn't benefit from the greater of 'as much RAM as you can afford' or 'as many GB as the motherboard can support'. This opinion stems from my use of PCs since the mid 1980s.

Having said that, my current desktop PC only has 8 GB RAM. It could take more but I've never considered it cost effective to add more as my home PC use is modest. I'm not a gamer and I'm an amateur photographer, I'm not trying to process large numbers of photographs.

For me, more important factors are having a SSD as my main system disk and large HHDs on which to store my image files. The former means my PCs boots in seconds and applications load in seconds. The latter means I have plenty of both working storage space and back up storage space.

[Chataignier]

Adobe says Photoshop will work with 8GB, but my experience is that 16GB is essential if you plan to run PS and other applications at the same time. My current PC (built 6 months ago) has 32GB - possibly an overkill for today, but I hope to keep it for a few years, and anyway, 16GB RAM costs less than 100$, so why not ?

If you decide for 16GB, make sure you have an upgrade path to 32GB.

PS : another vote for a good sized SSD, mine is 1GB. Again probably overkill for today, but not for 5 yrs on.

[Astro]

16 Gb should be fine, though if you are using photoshop it can/will use as much as you choose to assign it arguably speeding up rendering time if you are processing image stacks etc. (I would agree though that it is a good idea to ensure you have an upgrade path to 32Gb)

I process astrophotography images, sometimes stacking hundreds of captures and have 128Gb available to do this. But it is mostly needed to bring down the processing time for the intense mathematical integrations being carried out. (A stack of 500 30 second exposures took more than 24hrs to complete recently. Rendering the integrated image took seconds, and subsequent image processing required no more memory than 'conventional' photographic subjects.

[Martin A]

PS : another vote for a good sized SSD, mine is 1GB. Again probably overkill for today, but not for 5 yrs on.

That has to be the smallest SSD made, I would guess! Seriously though, thanks for your input, David.

[DanK]

I have 16 GB, and it's fine. If I were doing it over and the marginal cost were very small, I would probably go to 32 just to future-proof it. More critical than going over 16 GB is making sure that you have a video card that meets Adobe's requirements for photoshop.

I agree about an SSD. I wouldn't go smaller than 500 GB at this point. I have 1 TB, which is mostly unused. I have my photos on a secondary hard drive.

[lunaticitizen]

128 GB in my case. I did a lot of things with my computer, yet the memory usage has never exceeded 56 GB.
My Lightroom app has never used more than 4 GB of RAM

'Buy as much RAM as you can afford' is generally a sound approach; but in my case it's been kind of a waste. Never again.

[billtils]

16GB Ram is the baseline, more is better but not a requirement. I currently back-up from TimeMachine to a 2TB internal Crucial SSD but agree wholeheartedly with the comments on external SSDs - I use a 2TB Samsung T5 and a 1TB T7 (they host different libraries).

[Manfred M]

Both of my computers run on 36GB of RAM and with my workflow, I am often close to 100% utilization.

The one computer is 8 years old and I am planning to replace it and will be going with at least 64 GB. I also agree with the suggestions of SSD and would go a step farther and suggest you get a computer that supports at least two M.2 drives. These are located directly on the motherboard and do not need to use the SATA connections, which makes them even faster that regular SATA SSDs. I use one SSD as the system drive (so the operating system and software load quickly) and I save my working files on the other. I also set them as my swap drives.

My second computer is a laptop and is very well configured for a laptop, 2 x 2TB M.2 drives with a 100% Adobe RGB compliant screens and 32 GB of RAM. I bought it late last year, so no need to update it in the short-term,

As others have said, get a mid-range graphics card with 6 - 8 GM of graphics RAM will future proof your machine with Photoshop.

[Martin A]

Thanks to all! Manfred, I have bought a MB that supports three M.2 drives and a graphics card that has 8GB VRAM. As this may be the last computer I will own, I have opted to install 64GB RAM (2x32GB) and have room to expand it to 128GB. This may be overkill but at least I won't run out of RAM now or in the near future.

[Chataignier]

That has to be the smallest SSD made, I would guess! Seriously though, thanks for your input, David.

Ooops ! 1TB of course