At the moment, I'm in Italy working as a holiday rep. I have my 7D with me and because I drove down here, I was able to bring my full desktop PC and IPS Dell. So I've been shooting RAW and using Lightroom as I did in the winter in the mountains or I would at home. However, I can no longer afford to take my car in the winter, so will be taking a company flight. Consequently, I can't have my PC in the winter. My current "laptop" is an AMD powered netbook, which handles full HD video no worries and lasts forever on battery. It was purchased as a way to be online whilst I'm overseas and watch TV/movies, but that's it. I get better image quality out of my Galaxy Note these days and I'm sure it won't handle Lightroom. Either I need to purchase a laptop of some kind with a decent screen for movies/TV and that can handle Lightroom (my preferred option, but probably costly) or I need another way to process RAW files on a 10" netbook with a **** screen Ideas??
External hard drive and shoot both JPG and RAW in camera? If your careful the JPG's should be fine for most uses but you've got the RAW to go back to when you get home to work on to get the best out the image.
I take my netbook for backup purposes, including portable HDD. Then put the half sized JPG into my iPad, using SnapSpeed to make a few quick edits. As said, save the RAW for further edits that you might need to do on the best photos.
Thing is, in the winter I tend to shoot A LOT of skiers and boarders. Mostly at high speed and Lightroom makes it easy to get to the good stuff and having the RAWs gives me options with the tricky light. So is there no other way to handle RAWs on a crappy netbook?
Probably not. It takes my desktop a few moments to process a raw to jpg and it is orders of magnitude more powerful than the toy chip in a netbook not to mention 4x the memory and a good quality hard drive. I doubt even different software would help much the calculations are just complex. Have you tried it? It might be tolerable given your circumstances but I get the feeling even a very cheap laptop would be better.
Tried installing Lightroom on my netbook just for the sake of it. Unbearable. Anybody tried an android tablet with RAW software?
iPad can do it with iPhoto and other apps, so they are perfectly adequate at processing. I found they are quite a bit slower than desktop when exporting but that's expected. Just need to find a suitable Android app.
Have you thought about Photo Mechanic (haven't used it myself), which it's supposed to be much faster than LR and built for culling through a large number of photos. It also should be fully compatible with LR when you get back to your workstation.
Package up PC for transit and leave with buddy, when you reach your winter address arrange for courier to collect PC from buddy and deliver to your winter address. On returning home, rinse and repeat.
