Comments on: Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits : Review

By: Formica Sheets

Formica Sheets — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:11:31 +0000

both picassa and flickr are good if you want to share pictures online::~

By: Tristan Coleman

Tristan Coleman — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 08:28:56 +0000

Picassa and Flickr are both great tools for sharing photo online”,:

By: Valeria Kelly

Valeria Kelly — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:38:00 +0000

I use both Picassa and Flickr for sharing photos over the internet but i use Flickr more often than Picassa.;-,

By: Berndine

Berndine — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:50:04 +0000

Man, this is one killer samsung digital camera, check out this review.

By: Union Photography

Union Photography — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:09:07 +0000

Don’t forget the ability to ingest multiple memory cards at once, being able to do a live upload of selects to FTP / Web (ZenFolio for me – its critical for backing up off-site) and the awesome file naming / meta. Lightroom is *almost there* but simply isn’t as fast or powerful on the meta end. Also, this software allows you to save to a second location upon ingestion in either JPG or the original format. Again, critical for redundancy for me.

I ingest anywhere from 2000-6000 photos – At a time.

In a period of a week I can easily go through 15,000 photos (no, don’t buy used cameras from me!) so work flow is EXTREMELY important on the ingestion end.

Photo Mechanic > Lightroom > Photoshop is my current work flow.

By: Vlad

Vlad — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:56:48 +0000

To j.mac I like FastStone Image Viewer as well and I use it for most things…it is very fast and easy to use especially for transferring images to my computer. However, FastStone lacks one major thing: the ability to add IPTC tags and captions and geolocation information. If you don’t care about tags and geotags then Image Viewer is really the best considering it’s free. But if tags and geotags are important Picasa is the only free alternative. XnView also allows inserting IPTC tags but not geotags since they should be in the EXIF portion of the metadata.

PhotoMecanic seems to be the master of image metadata. I don’t use it but have read about it a lot and I might purchase it one of these days when I can justify the expense.

By: J. Mac

J. Mac — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:46:35 +0000

I still like FastStone Image Viewer, does almost everything its small, fast, and its free.

By: audimackid

audimackid — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:00:14 +0000

As was stated in the review, Photo Mechanic is intended for workflow and not for editing your pictures. I have tried Aperture, Adobe Bridge, and Picasa, and as others have commented, none of them are as fast as Photo Mechanic for ingesting pictures, sorting through them, editing the metadata, and renaming the files. If your picture handling needs are modest, than as someone else pointed out, Photo Mechanic my be overkill and using Aperture, Lightroom, or Adobe Bridge may be sufficient.

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:59:54 +0000

There are many features in PM that you have not mentioned that the other packages like lightroom and aperture do not do.

1. Code replacement – the ability to have a pre-loaded list of competitors with their numbers which in any field you use a shortcut with their number and up pops their names, club name or anything you have set in the preloaded file. Using this feature I have 3000 images keyworded with competitors names in one night.

2. I know youmentioned the speed, but I will mention it again, there is nothing on the market that matches the speed of this product.

3. To a, yes PM has a resizing feature, it is in the save as dialogue.

What you have to remember is that this package is aimed at PJ’s, it does not have pixel editing, only a basis crop. It does allow you however to edit with Photoshop. PM is not my workflow, it’s part of my workflow on certain jobs, especially news work. For everything else I use Aperture and Photoshop.

Basic cropping and outputting to the news services with extra fast speed is what this is designed for and it is the industry standard for doing so.

Oh and a couple of other cool features, if you lock a photo in your camera (if it has that feature), then it is automatically tagged in PM, and PM recognises the audio file and allows you to play it if you are using voice annotations in your camera (if your camera has that feature)

Mike B

By: Sime

Sime — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:27:21 +0000

a – Yes.

reznor – if you’re not a press / editorial photog, I’d stay with Lightroom… the point was, PM is much quicker than LR on ingestion – but not as much a full package for developing images.

Allan – I agree, probably even better if you constantly shoot RAW…

Sime