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Hi all, I'm looking at getting a new laptop (around £350 -£400) mainly just for storing photos and the odd bit of other use eg banking, stw forum browsing etc etc. I probably have around 25,000 pics and just need to be able to store them and view them quicky. I have no idea what to get though so any help would be great, do I need 8GB ram or will 4GB be enough? How much memory would I need to do what I want and future proof for a few years? Whats the best processor for around that budget or are they all kinda equal at that level? Cheers in advance for any help.
If you're just browsing the web and viewing your photos then an HD Chromebook with external ssd harddrive and a cloud storage account to keep the photos safe somewhere offsite.
Pay for a google drive account and your entire chromebook will be backed up automagically and your pics stored/sorted in Google photos 😉
Its difficult to know how much storage you need for 25,000 photos as it all depends on the level of resolution that its stored at, e.g. simple pictures on a mobile web site might be one-hundredth the size of a photo taken with a half-decent digital camera, and a 4k camera might take photos with a file size hundred times the standard digital camera etc.
You would be better storing the photos in a cloud based service (drop box, icloud etc) and accessing over the internet when required. If you want to store them locally and your budget is upto £400 then you are in traditional hard disk (HD) rather than solid state storage (SSD) territory. If you are using a traditional hard disk, you'll want to protect against hard disk failure by backing up the images to a cloud based service (pennies per month), or an external hard disk (£50 to 100 one-off cost).
If you use a cloud based storage for the photos, you can get a laptop with a SSD in your budget and this will feel much faster than any traditional HD drive based model, as the old HD is the bottleneck rather than the processor and memory. I'd rather go for 8GB RAM with a slower processor than 4GB RAM with a faster processor as memory would be the next potential bottleneck for the light usage you've described.
I probably have around 25,000 pics and just need to be able to store them and view them quicky
then buy 2 external hard drives (and back-up the photos to each one) and get a cloud back-up account. storing everything on a laptop just leaves you vulnerable to losing the irreplaceable images. presumably you have a computer already for viewing/storage.
If you are only going to view them online, back them up on to disk or something, and store that securely somewhere (make a couple of copies.)
Then just fire the photo's on google photos, and then you can access them from anywhere, phone, laptop, tablet, whatever.
You don't need any particularly special computer performance for viewing photos.
with external ssd harddrive
then buy 2 external hard drives
I bought a cheap laptop and simply switched out the hard drive for an internal SSD hard drive (significantly cheaper than buying a laptop with one already installed). I then use Google photos for backup.
If you’re just browsing the web and viewing your photos then an HD Chromebook with external ssd harddrive and a cloud storage account to keep the photos safe somewhere offsite.
I'd echo this.