IMatch - Windows Home vs Windows Pro

[moviemaker445]

A simple question with hopefully a simple answer.
Does IMatch get any benefit from running on the Pro version of Windows over running on the Home version?
Thanks in advance...
(BTW Love the new robots on the Splash screen Mario  )

[Mario]

Does IMatch get any benefit from running on the Pro version of Windows over running on the Home version?

No. It's all the same. Except that with Pro you get some extra Windows features and more control.

BTW Love the new robots on the Splash screen Mario  )

Thanks. Robot guy needed a vacation

[moviemaker445]

Good to know that the Home version is OK so I don't have to get the more expensive Pro version.

Following on from that - is there a 'sweet spot' as far as RAM goes for IMatch?

I am persevering with my i9 iMac (rather than a new Windows laptop that we discussed a while ago) and looking into running IMatch in Bootcamp instead of via Parallels.

My motivation is that Parallels limits Windows to using only 8GB of the 64GB installed in my iMac.

I am hoping that running IMatch in Windows Bootcamp will give it access to the full 64GB of RAM.

I created a new (tiny) IMatch database containing only 8 images to check for improved performance. The first test I ran was loading a very large Keyword text file from Photo-Keywords.com. Time to load it into the Thesaurus using Parallels was 15min. In Bootcamp it took 12m 30sec. A worthwile improvement.

Do you think that IMatch will show a similar overall speed improvement if it has access all 64GB of RAM?
(I value your opinion before I go to the time consuming task of reformatting my 4TB Media HDD from Mac APFS to Win NTFS so it will be readable by Win in Bootcamp.)

Cheers

[Mario]

IMatch does not need a lot of RAM - except for the Viewer, we it can load more and larger images in advance when there is more RAM. But even on a 8 or 16GB machine, IMatch will perform well.
The mount of RAM is not really important for IMatch. The speed of the disk containing the database is the critical factor. IMatch is basically a database server, and the faster the disk containing the database is, the faster IMatch performs.
I'm amazed at how fast the SSD is in my Notebook, for example, and how well IMatch performs on that computer.

A database with almost one million assets needs about 1GB of RAM.

The first test I ran was loading a very large Keyword text file from Photo-Keywords.com. Time to load it into the Thesaurus using Parallels was 15min. In Bootcamp it took 12m 30sec. A worthwile improvement.

That sounds really slow. Can you give more specifics? How large is this file?
The default thesaurus IMatch ships with has 2,400 rows and loads in 15 Milliseconds.

[moviemaker445]

[moviemaker445]

Oops, here is the text.
The file has almost 59,000 lines, is 1.2MB in size and has a hierarchy several levels deep. I've attached a screen grab showing BBEdit's Status info. Does that help?

[Mario]

60K keywords. Do you really need that many?
Having so many keywords will of course slow down all thesaurus operations, from mapping keywords on file ingest to lookups in the keywords panel, auto-suggestions etc. Not to speak of the time you'll spend figuring out which keywords to use...

Is this a commercial vocabulary or can you share it?

[moviemaker445]

Yes Mario, your question is right on the mark. 60K keywords is a massive overkill for my library.

The vocabulary is sold to professional photographers who want to sell their work via the major commercial sites on the web.

I have long realised that keywords are a powerful tool for finding things in the database but my attempts to date have been rather disappointing. This led me to rely mostly on 'descriptions' and 'location data' for finding media.

My early attempt at producing a flat keyword list soon became long and unwieldy so I decided to add a hierarchy. This too developed into a confusing mess so I avoided keywords until recently. My plan now is buy this commercial list and use it to educate myself on (hopefully) a better way to set up my keywords.

Once I have learned the techniques of where and how to allocate the keywords in a hierarchy, I will radically prune the massive list down to a size that suits my needs. Then as I keyword more of my photos/movies, I'll use the techniques learned to grow the list to suit my future needs.

The License Agreement forbids me from giving copies away but I have attached an outline from his website of the style Timothy Makins uses to produce the lists. He sells 119 different versions of the Keyword catalog and buyers choose the one that suits their location and interests.

Cheers

[Mario]

OK.