The ingest menu allows you to select a hard drive folder or camera card to move images into PhotoMechanic.
Photo Mechanic is available for both Windows and Mac and retails for $139. With the pace of these and other photographic specializations showing no sign of slowing down, Photo Mechanic 6 is sure to find a user base hungry for a speed boost. They use it to sort, cull, rename, and add metadata to lots of files fast, then transfer to pixel editing applications, online gallery sites, or directly to clients.
An upgrade from Photo Mechanic Pro 6 costs $90.Photojournalists, sports photographers, wedding photographers and even studio commercial photographers who need to move photos quickly from capture to uploading have turned to Photo Mechanic software for years. Perhaps those are the reasons the folks at Camera Bits seem to believe that’s more important and more worthy of their time and effort than having translucent sidebars and rounded square icons.Ī new licence currently retails at $229 directly from Camera Bits’s website. On the other hand, Photo Mechanic’s look immediately feels at home and I can find my way around it blindfolded. The only thing I would be able to criticise is that the interface has become a bit outdated.
I found Photo Mechanic Plus an incredibly powerful offering. They can be image collections based on date range, project type or subject, or whatever it is that you like to organize your database into.įinally, Collections are for combining images from multiple folders or drives into cohesive units to keep yourself organized. Catalogs are more or less the same as in Capture One Pro. If Photo Mechanic Plus were to let you roam the database as one giant pool only, it would still not be of much use, but the app luckily also supports catalogs. Filters come in handy if you are the forgetful type who sometimes skips filling in the metadata fields. Filters are more or less the same as predefined and optimized searches that let you browse your files by date, camera, lens, rating, colour class, and more. Photo Mechanic Plus comes with filters, which is another way to quickly find images. Of course, when you search for identical images regularly, Photo Mechanic Plus allows you to save such searches for later reuse. Searches can be simple or complex and since you’re now searching a database, it’s fast and allows you to find images across devices, mounted or not. Still, it’s filtering and searching that will get the most out of your collection. It does split up your experience in, for example, all images in a specific year, or only the ones that have been tagged, or with a certain label, etc. Browsing, however, is perhaps the least interesting way to go through your database. The Plus version, thanks to a highly performing database, made browsing those 9000 photos very smooth. It took less than half an hour to scan over 9000 pictures that included TIFF’s, DNG’s, ARW and JPEG files. After I did that, the medium-sized thumbnail creation took place on the fly and quickly. With my test app on a mid-2017 iMac 27in/3.4GHz i5 only, in catalog mode and 1632 RAW images found and listed in under a minute, I needed to disable the Render Cache in the Preferences first. The app then creates thumbnails and medium-res/medium-sized versions of your images so that, when you unmount a volume, the highest performance is guaranteed. To start using the database features, you first let PhotoMechanic Plus scan the drives and folders you wish to add. The interface design is pretty much the same as Photo Mechanic’s, with a number of additional icons, buttons and panels.
The database functionality is simply a different way to browse, find and manage your files, regardless of whether the images are located on a mounted disk drive, an offline RAID or NAS, or in the cloud. Photo Mechanic Plus builds further on that foundation.
With Photo Mechanic you never have to guess what’s in an image provided you fill in the fields that matter to you from the many, many metadata fields the app supports.
Professional photographers and photo journalists around the world use Photo Mechanic Plus to quickly and easily ingest images and update them with rich IPTC compliant metadata. The Plus version includes all the features of Photo Mechanic with the addition of an image database for making catalogues of every photo you’ve collected on both online and offline storage.
Photo Mechanic Plus is a new version of the application for ingesting, managing and processing image files before and after you edit them.