Photoshop Elements slow with external drive [was "Beginner"]

yahyah9  wrote Do I all of my photos on an external drive and then import a few at a time onto photoshop?   I can't have all of my photos loaded onto my computer. Also I have a trial of photoshop on my computer.   Why does it make it run so slow?   Is this normal? Thanks Debbie

My experience with Elements:

- Your hardware is ok for Elements (could be better, but I can work comfortably enough on a similar config)

- Storing the media on an external drive is quite common, I'd recommend a USB3 external drive (... and another one for backups). There is not much speed difference with the internal drive on most cases.

- Setting the 'scratch disk' may be important. It's not recommended to put it on the external drive. I suppose you have a single internal drive, so the important factor is to have enough space for the scratch disk in your preferences. See the Edit >> Preferences >> performance settings of the editor. The default setting should be good.

- Speed problems may be different in the editor and in the organizer. What can be dramatic is to have different 'automatic' 'background' tasks running : face detection, search for missing files, smart tagging... Maybe start by disabling them to see the difference and reenable them progressively. Face tagging in a big library can run for days... even weeks until the indexing is finished.

So, if you can tell what feature is slow or sluggish, we might advice something else.

If you're using an under powered computer, Photoshop will run slow.  Keep in mind that the system requirements are only a  baseline recommendation.  You also need a fast CPU + plenty of physical and RAM memory to support your operating system + Creative Cloud + all your other apps and utilities.

Photoshop system requirements

I do work with images stored on an 1TB external drive but it does make things a tad slower.