This tip was printed from the MalekTips Computer and Technology Help and Tips website at http://malektips.com.

Digital Photo Processing - Increase Your Computer's Memory

If you are planning on editing your digital photos on a computer, make sure it has plenty of on-board memory. 256 MB should be a bare minimum, 512+ MB is recommended, and 1 GB or more is useful when modifying larger photos.

Just because your digital camera took a JPG photo that is 2 MB doesn't mean that photo will take up only 2 MB in your computer memory. JPG images are compressed and have to be uncompressed when loaded into memory for editing. Plus, certain special effects and filters require making backup copies of the image in memory, so your digital photo software may create multiple copies of your image in the background. If you run out of physical memory, your photo program will start to use virtual memory to store these copies, causing your hard drive to thrash and computer to generally slow down.