Sure, it will browse any folder you want, and if you set up your image library in an easily identifiable structure, you could theoretically use Photo Mechanic as a catalog, but it was limited. The only problem I had was that it wasn’t a full catalog. I simply couldn’t imagine life without it.Įven though programs like Lightroom do all of this stuff, Photo Mechanic does it all so much faster and more efficiently. It’s what I use to import, caption, keyword, tags, rate, copy, move, save, export and upload my photos every single day. In my photography life, Photo Mechanic has always sat at the center of my workflow. This allows you to keep your photos organized in whatever way you wish, without having to close out and open a new catalog just to preview images from more than one catalog. Photo Mechanic Plus allows you keep multiple catalogs, and you can browse or search images from one or more catalogs at the same time. Photo Mechanic Plus allows you to combine images from multiple folders or drives into cohesive collections that help you stay organized, or present specific batches of images to your clients. Ī powerful filter tool allows you to browse photos by any parameter you select: date, camera, lens, star and color rating, capture time, and any other metadata you select. You can craft advanced search parameters that give you highly detailed results, and then you can save them so that you can find exactly what you want, at any time in the future. The search tool inside Photo Mechanic Plus allows you to search across multiple drives, even external hard drives and network drives, using simple keyword search to complex searches that cover everything from capture times, exact captions, image dimensions, locations and collections. Offering the same browsing experience and all of the same tools and features that make Photo Mechanic such a viable component in your photography workflow, Photo Mechanic Plus gives you even more tools to help you manage your digital photography life. (Read my post 4 Reasons Why I’m in Love with Photo Mechanic.)Ĭamera Bits, the company that makes Photo Mechanic, has been working on this for years, and this month, they released Photo Mechanic Plus, which combines all of the capabilities of the original program with a powerful image database. It’s been an absolutely indispensable tool, and the only thing that was missing was a full catalog function, hence the need for Lightroom, but that day has now arrived. If there’s one program that I have used more than any other program in my photography life during the past 14+ years, it’s Photo Mechanic. (Lightroom sends a copy of the file AFTER it’s already demosaiced the file through its own conversion process, which often leads to sharpness issues with Fuji X-TRANS RAW files.)

It handles RAW+JPEG seamlessly and efficiently, and unlike Lightroom, if you’re opening a RAW file in an external editor, like Luminar, Photo Mechanic sends the original file. Photo Mechanic is powerful solution for adding captions, keywords, tagging, staring, rating, copying, saving, moving, assigning GPS coordinates, adjusting capture times, adding watermarks and even uploading to social media.

Tens of thousands, as fast as you can scroll with the mouse or your trackpad.Īnd not just that. With Photo Mechanic, you can browse and scroll through huge folders of images, even RAW files, at blazing speed. Its performance is unparalleled by any other software. The sun just got a whole lot brighter, and for a short while, I even forgot about the pandemic.įirst released in 1998, Photo Mechanic has long been the world’s fastest image browser, and it’s perhaps the best all around photo management program around.

I can’t even begin to describe just how awesome this is, or how excited I am at this news, but in the few brief moments I read the announcement and downloaded the update, my photography life changed instantly. In what is undoubtedly the best news in all of 2020, Photo Mechanic software now has full image database functionality, which means you can use the program as your main photo catalog and image library.

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