Tested on several Mac’s
M4 Max Studio
M4 Mini Pro
M4 Mini
M2 Ultra
Why do they choke accessing my family’s photo Disk?
Ubuntu, Debian, Windows, and a dollar general blue ray player all open it no problem. What’s Mac missing?
Mac Studio (M4 Max, 2025)
t_JM wrote:
Convert PDFs to another format or jpeg etc to something else for instance?
Macs can handle .PDF files and .JPEG files just fine. However, if you've dumped a bunch of those files in some random organization on the drive, you may need to navigate to the folders in which the files are stored, to view them.
If you have dumped tons and tons of files into a single directory, you should break them up into multiple folders. Finder performance does not always scale well when there are huge numbers of files in a folder. If the root-level directory, or folder, that contains a huge number of files, is on optical media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray), the scaling problem is likely to be even worse, because optical discs are very slow compared to SSDs or even to mechanical hard drives.
I would suggest using a clone backup tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to copy the contents of the "photo disk" into a folder on one of your Mac's internal or external drives. Then work with the files in that folder.
Mac support MMX or SSE instruction sets?
I'm sure that many Intel-based Macs do. (You could look up Intel CPU model numbers using MacTracker – then cross-reference those with processor data sheets on Intel's site.). Apple Silicon Macs have their own machine code instruction set, and their own hardware-based acceleration, and thus would not use MMX or SSE, specifically.
But what does that have to do with anything? We're not talking about encoding or transcoding video in order to create some new home video disc.
t_JM wrote:
Convert PDFs to another format or jpeg etc to something else for instance?
Macs can handle .PDF files and .JPEG files just fine. However, if you've dumped a bunch of those files in some random organization on the drive, you may need to navigate to the folders in which the files are stored, to view them.
If you have dumped tons and tons of files into a single directory, you should break them up into multiple folders. Finder performance does not always scale well when there are huge numbers of files in a folder. If the root-level directory, or folder, that contains a huge number of files, is on optical media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray), the scaling problem is likely to be even worse, because optical discs are very slow compared to SSDs or even to mechanical hard drives.
I would suggest using a clone backup tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to copy the contents of the "photo disk" into a folder on one of your Mac's internal or external drives. Then work with the files in that folder.
Mac support MMX or SSE instruction sets?
I'm sure that many Intel-based Macs do. (You could look up Intel CPU model numbers using MacTracker – then cross-reference those with processor data sheets on Intel's site.). Apple Silicon Macs have their own machine code instruction set, and their own hardware-based acceleration, and thus would not use MMX or SSE, specifically.
But what does that have to do with anything? We're not talking about encoding or transcoding video in order to create some new home video disc.
What sort of "photo disk" are we talking about?
If we are talking about a recordable disk, do you know what type of media is involved? There are multiple types of recordable or rewritable CDs and DVDs, and all types are not compatible with all players.
Note that Apple dropped all support for the HFS ("no +") filesystem as of Catalina. Modern versions of macOS will reportedly refuse to read
But presumably your disc is not a HFS-only CD, given that it plays on a "dollar general blue ray player".
Yup, You’re right.
There’s a limit to how many items can be in a folder.
I was able to reproduce and confirm this by duplicating file in directory and measuring access time.
File types that contain metadata cause higher latency over time.
Apple is really falling behind in the times.
My computer from 2005 can open it just fine after about a three seconds but my 2025 Mac takes several minutes to several hours and forgets that it’s already cached the directory when you scroll through files.
Thanks for helping me identify this limitation! It really kinda has me upset with Apple.
That should be on the Filesystem limitations page for sure!
Can any of those listed Macs mount and play anything on that dollar general blu-ray player? You would likely need a USB to USB-C adapter at minimum, and depending on the age of that device, it may not be hardware compatible with newer Macs.
It’s old DVD media made on windows.
bunch of pictures DCIM dumps, random cameras and iPhone images all dumped into the root of the disk and copied onto a usb drive.
it’s tons of duplicate files names even though the files are different.
I dumped the folder contents and renamed duplicates, then sorted everything by date and time.
the dollar store blue ray is a TV blue ray player. It’s to play movies, it just so happens to open this disk & usb.
is there any format I can convert everything to that would process faster?
Convert PDFs to another format or jpeg etc to something else for instance?
maybe less photo disk, as random downloaded **** in a folder that hasn’t been sorted properly ever.
im guessing it’s a limitation of Mac hardware because I’ve asked this questions several times and never once have I received a straight answer.
Mac support MMX or SSE instruction sets?
What is a photo Disk?????????????????????????????
Why’s Mac struggle with photo disk?
