RAM vs SSD for editing

[Evandar]

My friend recently bought an ASUS laptop for photo editing and light video editing. He bought a relatively low spec one with a 940 MX, 8 GB RAM and an i5 8th gen processor( not sure on the model number but it's an U series processor so probably 8550U). As expected, Photoshop doesn't exactly run smoothly on it, neither does Premiere. Lightroom does fine but could be much better. So, on the laptop two things can be upgraded, RAM and SSD,his question to me was; which upgrade will improve the performance by a greater margin? (He does plan to upgrade both eventually but can only do one at a time.) Also he can only double the RAM i.e to 16 gigs with one stick as there is only one slot.

[Akira Shimazu]

Ram of course. ive notice differentiation about SSD and RAM for editing in my own life. Ram to 16GB can run 1080pediting smoothly like no buffer for my preference. not just editing but also rendering. 8 gigs to 16 can increase 2.5x rendering time.

[homeap5]

Premiere I can understand, but Photoshop? It should run smooth even on much worse spec. You know that Photoshop has configuration where you can setup how much ram it use?

[Evandar]

13 hours ago, homeap5 said:

Premiere I can understand, but Photoshop? It should run smooth even on much worse spec. You know that Photoshop has configuration where you can setup how much ram it use?

I do but he frequently does wedding/events to provide the photos of course but also albums which includes a large number of photos all editing at once, the trouble is that in our college we do have a photography department which is well funded and has iMacs running i7 7th gen processors and AMD graphics(don't remember which ones) with 16 gigs of memory so there is a very large difference in loading times which he is trying to improve

[homeap5]

If you need edit all photos (batch processing), use ImBatch - very nice program. Free if you're using one thread, paid for multithread (I bought license - sometimes I need to process over 1000 images and I don't like to wait).