[kman42]

My father-in-law just bought an iPod photo for his PC. He is very happy with it and left me a message last night that "Apple rocks! It transfered 1200 photos in 39 minutes!"

While he thought this was fantastic, I thought "Jesus, that's slow".

I think he has a 4 megapixel camera. If his photos are 4 MB each, then that is 4.8GB of photos. On a USB2.0 or Firewire connection running at 480Mbps or 400Mbps, it should only take 80 seconds. Throw in some random slowness for using a PC and it still shouldn't take more than 3 or 4 minutes, right? Could he be using USB1.1 or is there some other problem?

I want to have some answers or possible answers before talking to him.

kman

[megasad]

Originally posted by kman42:
My father-in-law just bought an iPod photo for his PC. He is very happy with it and left me a message last night that "Apple rocks! It transfered 1200 photos in 39 minutes!"

While he thought this was fantastic, I thought "Jesus, that's slow".

I think he has a 4 megapixel camera. If his photos are 4 MB each, then that is 4.8GB of photos. On a USB2.0 or Firewire connection running at 480Mbps or 400Mbps, it should only take 80 seconds. Throw in some random slowness for using a PC and it still shouldn't take more than 3 or 4 minutes, right? Could he be using USB1.1 or is there some other problem?

I want to have some answers or possible answers before talking to him.

kman

Either it was also syncing his music, which would mean he has between about 110GB and 130GB, whih is a bit more than will fit on even the largest iPod... Though that would be if USB 2.0 or FireWire actually operated at their full theoretical speed... Or, more likely, as you suggested, he plugged the iPod into a USB 1.1 port, rather than USB 2.0 or FireWire. Maybe his machine has USB 2.0, but only on the back, and he plugged it into one of the ports on the front?

[mbryda]

You're forgetting it doesn't send full rez pics to the iPod. It scales and transferres the scaled image....

[Parky]

If it was the first time that he had done the sync then it would take a while as each photo has to be processed by iTunes first before the transfer takes place.

iTunes makes 3 versions of each photo before they are transferred to the iPod :-

1. Tiny image used in the thumbnail screen, makes it very quick as the file size is very, very small.

2. An image to fill the iPod screen again small in size, still allowing the iPod to scroll quickly through the photos.

3. An image to be displayed on the TV, this is optimised for the standard TV size and has a resolution of 640 x 480. This again can be quite a bit smaller than the original image file and allows the iPod to do the slideshows with music from it's low power processor.

Of course you can also have the full size original image transferred to the iPod as well, but no additional processing is done to this, it is simply a file transfer and these files cannot be accessed on the iPod.

What you probably saw in the 39 minutes was the production of the images needed by the iPod and then the transfer to the iPod (which would have been quite quick). How long this process takes will depend on the performance of the PC and not on the iPod. if you have a new PC with plenty of power it should rip through the conversion quickly, but if it is an older PC and the originals are big files then it could take a while.

Next time your father adds say 50 photos to his PC and he connects the iPod, the conversion will be quicker as only 50 photos will be processed.

I transferred over 4000 photos to my iPod from my iMac G5, it took around 30 mins to process the photos and less than 2 mins to transfer them over.

Ian

[Link]

Don't forget the ipod's hard drive is nowhere near fast enough to saturate firewire, that firewire isn't 100% efficient, and that itunes has to scale down for every picture to make the thumbnails (you get the idea).

39 minutes isn't bad, if it's a LOT of pictures