# Travelling with MacBook Air 11" 4Gb RAM



## raptor (Aug 20, 2013)

Hi everyone. I'm new to the LR Forum and it looks great!
I am wondering if anyone can tell me if they run LR 5 on one of the new MacBook Air 11" 4 Gb Ram.  How does it run?

I already have an iMac 27" at home with a very large collection of photos but need something to travel with.
Over 2-3 weeks I generally take around 2000-3500 photos when I travel. I like to travel light and want to purchase a MacBook Air 11”.  I intend to carry a couple of external drives to store all my new photos and manage them with LR5.   

I'll mainly use LR for batch renaming, metadata presets, keywording, GPS tagging, tagging/flagging, and saving metadata to the side car XMP files.  Maybe the odd crop and quick develop but no serious editing in the Develop module, I'll leave that to when I get back home.  I won't be bringing my existing catalog from home along with me when I travel with smart previews etc... And will just create a new catalog for my trips, then import them back to my master catalog at home.  I don't particularly need a big screen.  Again, that will be taken care of when back home.  I don't intent to run other program's at the same time as LR.

Will the MacBook Air have sufficient performance? 11" MacBook Air, 128Gb HDD, 4 Gb RAM.

Thanks!


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## clee01l (Aug 20, 2013)

About a year ago, I decided that 4GB was not enough. And this was before LR5 was released.  I got a 13" RetinaMBP  w 8GB RAM and 512 SSD.  I also thing the 11" screen insufficient for doing real work in LR.   I use the rMBP as a travel computer and keep my travel catalog on the SSD and a backup to a 2.5"EHD.  So far this has been working great.   When I return I use the "Import from Catalog" function on the iMac to merge the contents of my travel catalog into the master catalog.


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## raptor (Aug 20, 2013)

Ok thanks. When you say "real work", do you mean develop module editing or sorting, tagging, flagging, keywords only.  How did it run doing just the later items?


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## clee01l (Aug 20, 2013)

I have a Nikon D800. NEFs are ~40mb and 36mp. I can manage to view these on my rMBP, but it gets very tedious trying to do fine detail development work on 36mp and a 13" retina display.


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## raptor (Aug 20, 2013)

Does anyone else use the MacBook Air 11" or 13" and run Lightroom ? 

How does it perform?

Will it run slowly ?

Is 8 Gb RAM necessary?

Will I need more than 128Gb SSD even if I keep all my photos on external HDD's ?

Raptor


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## raptor (Aug 20, 2013)

Ok any other reports?


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## Replytoken (Aug 21, 2013)

In some respects, I think that your biggest challenge is screen size, not RAM or CPU.  What is the smallest screen size that you have ever used with LR?  I realize that you are not planning to undertake serious post-processing, but you may still find an 11" screen to be quite a challenge.  Have you considered any alternate tools that might handle some of your early workflow?  Marc Rochkind has a few programs that will handle some of the actions you wish to accomplish, but while they may be CPU and RAM friendly, they may also be "screen challenged".

I, too, have desired to have an ultra light and ultra portable computer to use while travelling, but from watching threads here over the years, 11"MBA's and iPad often get mentioned, but not many people find them to be ideal solutions.  If you could possibly handle a 13" MBA, you might find the trade off in size to be worthwhile.  Then again, there are those like Cletus who would have you move up one more notch to a 13" MBP to get an even better experience.  It's all a matter of trade offs.

Good luck,

--Ken


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## dividor (Aug 21, 2013)

I've used LR4 on my Macbook air extensively. It's not ideal of course due to screen size, but it's perfectly functional, I can process on import (canon 6D shooting raw) with my presets, organize, etc. It's best if you are careful with ensuring your catalog doesn't get too big. I tend to have a travel catalog, which I merge into my base catalog when home. I even import directly to an external disk, though that can be a bit slow when I have big/slow cards.

I've started using LR5 on the road too, but the handling of videos is awful (apparently in LR4 too, but I never noticed). Some known bug with dynamiclinkserver.


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## clee01l (Aug 21, 2013)

Replytoken said:


> In some respects, I think that your biggest challenge is screen size, not RAM or CPU.


A small screen is easy enough to experience. Just reduce the LR window from full size to a window that is no bigger than the full screen on a MBA. Try to do some practical work in LR with the window that size. You will find that the panels left and right, top and bottom can only be reduced to a certain minimum size and have to remain hidden whenever you are working with a loupe vie  or in the develop module.  
If you are content with this result, then you might be able to tolerate the 11" MBA.


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## Replytoken (Aug 21, 2013)

clee01l said:


> A small screen is easy enough to experience. Just reduce the LR window from full size to a window that is no bigger than the full screen on a MBA. Try to do some practical work in LR with the window that size. You will find that the panels left and right, top and bottom can only be reduced to a certain minimum size and have to remain hidden whenever you are working with a loupe vie  or in the develop module.
> If you are content with this result, then you might be able to tolerate the 11" MBA.



Excellent suggestion, Cletus!

--Ken


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## raptor (Aug 21, 2013)

That's a good suggestion for screen size. Honestly, as long as its viewable, and not slow, I'd much prefer this size.

What about Performance. Will 4Gb, 128Gb be enough?

Raptor


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## clee01l (Aug 21, 2013)

raptor said:


> That's a good suggestion for screen size. Honestly, as long as its viewable, and not slow, I'd much prefer this size.


Please try this first before you make such a statement. And No one is saying that it will be fast. My rMBP is slower than my iMac and it will be faster than your MBA.


> ...What about Performance. Will 4Gb, 128Gb be enough?...


 You already have my answer to that in my first response.  I would not be happy in that environment. You might be.  128GB is basically 4 of my 32GB camera cards worth of data. Or for me, about 1600 images (Not many travel days worth of shooting)  Also needed to cram into that 128GB is the OS, Applications, and User data.  my rMBP is holding ~70GB of basically OS and Applications, and very little User data.  The Swapfile (and you will use this a lot with only 4GB) and Working storage will want to claim around 32GB of that 128GB.  So this means that you have about 25GB to do as you wish . And will be carrying around and using those extra EHDs  With my rMBP, I have a 500GB SSD and I carry a 1TB USB3 EHD for TimeMachine Backups and backup copies of all the images that I import into LR from the camera card. The last thing you want to happen on a trip is to come home with no images to show for your travels. This is why Backups are even more important when traveling.  Your image data is most vulnerable when it resides on a postage stamp sized camera card and no place else. Lose the card or the card gets damaged and you have nothing. 

BTW, you do realize the 11" MBA does not have a built in SDXC slot.  So you will also need a card reader whether your camera uses CF or SD cards.


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## raptor (Aug 22, 2013)

Ok thanks for the info.

The size looks manageable. 

As for performance, I understand that you would not be happy in that environment.  I was wondering if anyone has had this configuration and can report on it's performance. Even a 13” MBA with 4Gb would suffice.  

The swapfile info is interesting.  I wonder if the file is larger for rMBP because of the retina screen?  I'll be storing all my photos externally and only run LR and the operating system. That's it, and hence why I was wondering in that configuration if 128Gb would be sufficient.  What other applications have you loaded in addition to the OS? Just so I can work out if how much of the 128Gb is used by the OS and LR and the swap file.  It might just work.

Thanks for the SDXC heads up, I noticed that when doing my research!  I shoot CF and always carry a card reader.

Raptor


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## clee01l (Aug 22, 2013)

The swap file is the file that is created when applications need more RAM than the system has available. The 4gb in the MBA will cause more swapping and create a larger swap file that a system with 8gb or one with 16. This file will rarely exceed more then a few GBs. Working storage OTOH can consume up to 1/4 of your HD. So, the 25% freespace is what most  recommend for optimum performance. LR always make extensive use of working storage.


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## dividor (Apr 9, 2014)

clee01l said:


> The swap file is the file that is created when applications need more RAM than the system has available. The 4gb in the MBA will cause more swapping and create a larger swap file that a system with 8gb or one with 16. This file will rarely exceed more then a few GBs. Working storage OTOH can consume up to 1/4 of your HD. So, the 25% freespace is what most  recommend for optimum performance. LR always make extensive use of working storage.



I appreciate this thread is quite old now. But having just got back from 6 months on the road, I thought I'd write down how I managed to happily use a MBA on the road. It's all written up in my blog here. 

http://regolith.org/blog/2014/04/09/photo-and-video-processing-on-the-road-with-a-2010-macbook-air/

Hope this helps!


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## raptor (May 13, 2015)

Here's an update on my experience after I originally began this topic and purchased the 11" MacBook Air, 500 SSD 8 GB Ram.

For my needs it works perfectly. No lags or delays. Storage of photos on external HDD and performing mainly Library module tasks was excellent. Size was fine but I did miss my 27" iMac till I got home to Develop the photos.


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## mcasan (May 14, 2015)

My 15" Retina Macbook Pros is my computer both at home and at shooting events.  At home it sits in a BookArc, connections to a Thunderbolt Display, external keyboard, extermal mouse, and Thunderbolt drives.   When we are in the field, I will have around 700GB of internal SSD space to import and edit the images.   When I get home, I finish the edits and move the complete folders off to my external RAID set to /Pictures/Lightroom.  When I am home that is also the location for the catalog backups.  

If we are gone for 2-3 weeks and I start to run out of room on the internal SSD, I use my 1TB Samsung 840EVO connected via USB 3 (enclosure does UASP) for the extra storage.   Backup done by Time Machine to a 2TB portable drive.   That combo has so far provided up to 3 weeks of storage.    As we all know, it is important to cull after the shoot and not import every file the camera made.

I may try one of the LaCie Rugged RAID 4TB drives and run it in RAID 1 2TB.


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