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<p>Thanks for taking the time to try to help. Whenever I have question about something I know nothing about I search the web for a forum relating to it and ask the experts.</p>

<p>My Mother-in-Law is an avid travler, loves taking pictures, making albums, sharing with her friend, and on social media. She has always wanted a laptop to carry with her on here trips so she can spend her evenings playing with the pictures.</p>

<p>I am curious is there a certian type of lap top that tailors to avid photographers? If so what is your reccomendations? If not what is a great software to use?<br>

Keep in mind that though she loves the hobby, computeres at times overwhelm her so I would be looking for not only funtional but also user friendly.</p>

<p>I apologize in advance to the forum mods if this post is in the wrong area.</p>

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<p>I'm making the same decision for myself. I have been an Apple user for years. My system at home has an Xserve at the top with 24 TB RAID drive on top and several iMacs under it with a number of multi TB external hard drives. For travel, I'm thinking of getting the smallest Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM and an external drive with about 500 GB of storage. That would be good for about a week of travel. If I needed more, I would consider an external DVD drive to make hard copies of my work.</p>
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<p>If "playing with pictures" includes much pre-processing of bigger files, I would strongly suggest to go beyond the 8GB of RAM. I always travel with a MacBook Pro with 16GB because of its speed and general capacity working in Photoshop. If not, I agree with Virginia. But these are the expensive solutions. There are much cheaper alternatives around, which others might care to inform about.</p>
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<p>You need to be able to answer a few questions . </p>

<p>First- "playing with the pictures" That can mean anything from looking at the days output, to fairly hard-core photo-editing. Where on the spectrum does she sit or want to sit? Some people like to perform the complete editing job right away. Others (including me) prefer to leave hard-core editing till I get home and in any case would prefer to use the trip time for a quick review (do I need to do this again?) and planning the next days travel and photography.</p>

<p>Second, whats the volume /storage requirement likely to be? I think I photograph a lot when I'm travelling- and I hope so since I photograph scarcely at all when I'm home. But my results on a three week trip are not much more than a day's work to Virginia, and even as a professional I've never shot more than 70GB ( little over 2000 raw files) on a trip. So keeping the photos on the cards I can get a whole trip backed-up on a drive with space of 70GB max. Please understand that I'm not promoting my way- just making a rather obvious point that what she needs depends on what she does/wants to do. </p>

<p>Third, what does she want to carry? What with wires, chargers, a CD/DVD read/writer maybe as well as the photo gear , the total can be considerable in terms of volume and weight. </p>

<p>A 250 GB/4 GB Ram windows 7 netbook meets my needs pretty well, but I don't know whether it'll meet your Mother-in Law's even remotely without more info.</p>

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Does she really need "The Best" laptop? I shoot and process a lot on the road and my MacBook Air (with 4 GB of ram,

no less) works exceptionally well with Lightroom. Last year I gave up my MacBook Pro with no negative consequences.

 

If however she's slogging multiple large files with multiple layers each, shots professionally, etc, she might need more...

www.citysnaps.net
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<p>Thank you all for the great responses. Guess I should have clarified better. She does not need the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles. Just a funtional, user friendly device that she can travel with. She has never used an apple device in her life and still has problems navigating a windows based device at times.</p>
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<p>David, she currently does the same thing you do with a small twist. She carries several SD cards and uses one relitave to the area she is in, when she leaves say Montana she tags that SD Card Montana and then puts another SD card in for the time she is in say, Utah.<br>

She recently came back from a 10 day trip and took around 1000 pictures. </p>

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<p>What's the budget? How much weight is she comfortable carrying?</p>

<p>While I wouldn't want to use my sub-$300 Windows 7 laptop as my primary editing machine, it's not bad at all with Picasa, and tolerable with Lightroom 4.x. It's just 4GB RAM, with a 1.6GHz AMD APU. Picasa is a zippy lightweight program for any low end machine. Lightroom offers more features but I need a bit more patience with some tasks on the laptop. File sizes might be a factor too. My largest files are from 10 MP raw files. Processing larger raw files might be a drag on a low end laptop.</p>

<p>Weight and bulk may be critical factors as well. I can't lug much weight in a shoulder bag or I'll suffer the wrath of the neck and back crampmonsters. My Lenovo B575 laptop turned out to be too heavy at just over 5 lbs for routine lugging on day trips, so I rarely tote it anymore.</p>

<p>If I wanted something for travel and sharing via social media or email, I'd probably choose a tablet, ultrabook or Mac equivalent now. It'd definitely need to be well under 5 lbs or I'd end up leaving it behind.</p>

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<blockquote>

<p>Just bear in mind that laptops are routinely really difficult to colour calibrate...</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Actually the MBP retina screens calibrate quite well, that's one of the main advantages the MBP for a laptop if you need one.<br>

</p>

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>>> Virginia, a MB Air wold probably work well lfor you then.

 

And the new 2013 13" model will run for up to 12 hours on a battery charge. And weighs 3 pounds, ideal

for photo processing on the road. Lightroom works great as well...

www.citysnaps.net
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<p>Just wanted to be sure that the OP is aware that there are functionally adequate , small and low -cost PC netbooks that from what he's said might well do the job if he doesn't fancy paying the Mac premium. My little Acer cost little over £200 ($300) and is perfectly adequate for loading and looking at photographs, email , web browsing and so on. As Keith Reeder indicates, its not able to be perfectly calibrated, but it is possible to get it to the point where pictures look pretty much "right" bearing in mind that you're looking at a very early-stage image. Better than looking at a 3" screen anyway. I would not use it for anything but the most trivial od editing- but then I don't want to edit in the field anyway. </p>
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