I No Longer Use Both A Desktop And Laptop For Home And Travel Image Editing And Storage; How Is Only Using A Laptop Meeting My Photographic Needs?

The image I mentioned in the narrative below. Bailey Yard, the world's largest rail
classification yard, is about 8 miles long and, at its widest point, almost 2 miles wide.
(click to enlarge)

Recently, I was asked if I would write about how well only using a laptop computer for all of my photo work was working for me instead of using a desktop for home editing and a laptop for travel photography as I have for many years.  I thought I would also, again, write about my home as well as travel photographic workflow or those of you who may be interested.

For many years my normal computer setup has been a moderately powerful desktop computer (I’ve used both Dell and Hewlett-Packard), 27" monitor, Wacom tablet, two additional internal hard drives (a 2TB SSD strictly for storing programs and data separately from the operating system and a high capacity traditional hard drive that contained only my images) two external backup hard drives (a third kept offsite and backed up monthly) and, of course, a keyboard.  All of this for all of my home computer use.  For travel, I used a laptop (again, both Dell and Hewlett-Packard over the years) and took along two small, 1TB USB traditional hard drives for backup along with a smaller Wacom Tablet.  This system worked well, as I said, for several years.

In 2020, before we sold our home and built our new home I realized my desktop computer was about 9 years old! It had become painfully slow in editing image files.  Nine years seems to be ancient in computer technology terms.  As an example, I would move a Lightroom slider and sometimes have to wait a second or more to see what effects the move had on my image.  Additionally, my laptop was about 7-8 years old.  

I decided that when the next Black Friday, the holidays or annual computer sales arrived that I would take advantage of those sales to upgrade my computer systems.  The question for me became, "Do I keep a dual system or can a modern, powerful laptop take the place of both?"

After thoroughly looking into this, I felt comfortable that a powerful laptop could provide everything I needed to replace both my computers.  However…

Three issues immediately came to mind that I would need to overcome .  They were, a) how do I separately calibrate my external monitor while also accurately calibrating the laptop’s monitor since I would be using both independently and, b) with all of my images on an 8TB internal hard drive and no internal secondary SSD hard drive of that size available to store all of my images, how do I deal with that and maintain the speed of an internal hard drive and, c) how do I connect all of the peripherals to a laptop with only a couple of USB (A, C or Thunderbolt) ports?

The solution I found for monitor calibration turned out to be relatively easy.  My monitor is made by BenQ and they make free ‘hardware’ (monitor) color calibration software, called Palette Master,  so I could calibrate the monitor itself but also separately color calibrate the laptop’s monitor using an i1 Display Pro, which I have used for years.  I could successfully use the 27” monitor at home and the laptop’s monitor when traveling, both mirroring each other in luminance, color balance, saturation, contrast, etc.

As far as the issue of speed for an external hard drive for storing my images, I bought a USB 3.1 Western Digital external hard drive and would modify the Windows settings so the the drive never sleeps.  That should give me as much speed as possible with a setup like this.

Finally, I would buy a hub into which all of my peripherals could be plugged and then a single USB C or Thunderbolt connection into the computer.  Time to move forward.

After much research, I made the decision to replace both of my computers with a powerful laptop.  My research pointed me to a Dell XPS 15 computer with an 11th generation i7 processor, 32gb or RAM and a 2TB SSD.  I did not want a 4K monitor with a 15” screen as the resolution would be too high, IMHO, and as a result make all of the type size and program structure too small. I would go with a FHD monitor.

I ordered my custom configured laptop while it was on sale.  In fact, I bought a refurbished model while on sale and save quite a bit of money.  I’ve had Dell refurbished models in the past and never had a problem with any of them.  They come with a warranty and, typically, if something is going to go wrong, it will be be within the warranty period.  All of my data would be backed up and safe on multiple external hard drives so if a failure occurred, all of my images and data would be safe.  As we know, any computer can fail at any time so I didn’t feel as though I was taking an unnecessary risk.  I felt confident.

A tiny portion of the image above showing extreme sharpness and detail.  This snippet can be found between the two beige colored towers just to the left of center.  (click to enlarge)

As a confirmation that my laptop can handle extremely heavy workloads, with my Nikon Z7II, I made twelve 45.7mp images of the world’s largest train classification yard (Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska) from their Golden Spike Tower to be combined into a panorama.  The resulting image is 352.25mp in size!  That’s not a typo.  Three hundred and fifty two point two-five megapixels!  That is 2.064 gigabytes in one file.  Processing into a file that size would test any computer.  Not only did the laptop handle this extremely large file expediently, but I then put the file through Topaz Sharpen AI and the computer easily handled that extreme computational rendering as well.  It seems this little XPS 15 can handle about anything I throw at it!

So…what is my workflow?  For home, nothing has changed.  I import my images into Lightroom Classic as I normally would, with the primary image being stored on the WD external drive and a backup being temporarily stored on a small USB SSD.  That way I immediately have two copies saved and, if necessary, I can reformat my camera’s two memory cards.  I then edit them and back everything up every evening just as I did previously.  That gives me two additional copies of everything.  Additionally, I write my blog posts, conduct other household business as before on the laptop as I did with the desktop.  

The new external hard drive seems as fast (or faster) as the old internal one when importing, editing and exporting image files.  I credit that to the laptop being much more powerful and able to handle the larger files and intensive graphics processing much more expediently.  Also, the laptop has Thunderbolt 4 ports which help with speed of transfer.

There isn’t much difference in my travel workflow either.  I use a single Thunderbolt 4 port into the laptop and that supplies power as well as a connection for all of my peripherals.  I simply unplug that single wire, place my laptop into my travel case and I’m ready to go.  The laptop also has two additional Thunderbolt ports that I can use if necessary.  I still take along two external 1TB USB hard drives, but both are now SSDs.  I create a travel catalog on one of the SSD external hard drives and that is where I import and store my images.  The other serves as a backup along with a third copy of my images on the camera’s memory card itself.  

Each evening, I open Lightroom, create the appropriate folder, keyword and import my images.  When I return home, I use the “Import as a Catalog” command and my keyworded (along with some of the images already edited for use in my blog while traveling) images are now in my main catalog and the images transferred to my desktop external hard drive.

One thing I think I can do but have not yet quite figured out is use my main LR catalog while traveling but store the images on the small USB SSD.  Then, when home, just transfer the files to my home external hard drive for permanent storage.  I need to work on that for my next travel.  That should save me some time.

If you have any questions about my procedure or how I could improve or streamline it, please let me know.  I’m all about efficiency and if there is something I’m missing or could do more expediently, I would appreciate benefiting from your experience.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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