Ask HN: Best configuration for a hobby photographer
A friend of mine is in the process of acquiring a new PC for image processing and photography.
It should mainly run Adobe Lightroom well.
So far the idea is to have medium CPU power (i5), 16 GB RAM and big hard disks to take all the RAWs.
Anybody with experience who wants to share their wisdom on this?
I think I fit into this demographic myself, (although I think a pro might have better advice from their view on high) and I've found that my laptop's SSD is perfect for organising my photo collection. I'll often be shoving around a few hundred MB of images and the edge SSDs have really does show. By extension a good SD card is also a must, it not only helps the speed of camera operation (say a long exposure shot in RAW might take ages to write to card) but it also cuts down that achingly long time it can take to transfer from camera to PC.
Other than that I'm running an i7 laptop with 8GB RAM, it has no problems with image processing. I'd guess a good i5 wouldn't either but I'd go with the higher end ones just in case. Drawback of my SSD is that I need external storage eventually for archive purposes.