Photo mechanic review professional#

Photo Mechanic is a third party app that is primarily used by professional sports and event photographers who want to quickly import, tag, and rate photos. I've been testing out this workflow and I've actually found it to be extremely fast and simple. Dozens of you wrote back and asked how photographers can use Photo Mechanic together with Lightroom for the fastest possible workflow. But I'm sure PM+ will be good at what it does.Last week I published a video on the Improve Photography Youtube Channel showing that Lightroom import is 600% slower than other competitive programs. The boat for traditional single user DAMs was already sailing away in 2006. But in LR you'll always see each image in its colour-corrected state or with the shadows lifted to show all that interesting detail. PM+ is rather like the cataloguing apps such as iView MediaPro that preceeded LR and Apple Aperture, so it shows the uncorrected image from its embedded thumbnail - weird WB, black shadows. Just imagine pictures taken under horrid artificial / mixed / changing lighting, or others which you needed to greatly underexpose. What is the value of an application that doesn't display your pictures in their edited state? That's what Lightroom does, and PM+ doesn't. I haven't tried it, but I would expect it to be good at what it does.Īgain I think one should step back and consider the big picture.

Photo mechanic review plus#

It's called Photo Mechanic Plus and my memory is long enough to remember conversations about PM working on a catalogue-driven app way back in 2006, so I was amused and surprised when it was finally released in 2020. 'If memory serves me, I believe that Photo Mechanic is working on this (or it may already be released). If you're not using the DAM part to organize and keyword, and are really just using folder organization, there is not much point to Lightroom.

Lightroom Classic really is just camera raw with a DAM wrapped around it and a few bells and whistles added. Camera Raw just uses the xmp metadata files to store edits contrary to Lightroom that stores the edits in its catalog file which is the fundamental cause of your issue. Since you are not actually using Lightroom as a DAM but are actually using PM to do ingestion, on disk organization, and keywording I would question the value you are getting out of it and you might be far better off just using camera raw (call it from Bridge or from Photoshop). Lightroom will complain you might lose edits but they are actually already written into the files after step 1 and all that will happen is that the changed keywords will get added to the images that were involved in step 1. Then before step 4, make sure to from Lightroom to 'read metadata from files'. If you want to keep Lightroom in your workflow, what you need to do is to after step 1 to write metadata to files from Lightroom to those few you imported to send to the client at web resolution. Thanks for any insights you, or others, can offer. Perhaps LR can't do what Capture One does as it relates to this issue.

Photo mechanic review software#

I've gone through the settings on both pieces of software and cannot find a setting that supports this. Greedy me wants to keep the edits AND keep the updated metadata - the tags.Ī colleague uses Capture One and apparently this is not an issue for him.

The other choice is to import the new settings (the player tag) but I lose the edits. I get a prompt that offers me two opions: Overwrite what Photo Mechanic has with what LR has, which means I lose the tag but keep the edits. It's at this point that LR points out that the metadata has changed for those files that are the in-game files that now have the player tags added. Step 4: Edit everything for final filing. So only the additional photos are added to LR. The in-game photos are not re-exported to LR as I have the setting not to import apparent duplicates. Step 3: Export ALL photos into LR for post-processing. Tag ALL the identified photos, including those that were filed as in-game images. Step 2: After the game, review all the photos from the game, identify photos that will be filed with the client as High-Res images, including the previous in-game photos. Step 1: ingest photos using Photo Mechanic, select the few photos to be immediately filed without tagging individual players (just not enough time) and export to LF for editing and then export for filing with the client.