Camera Bits Inc Photo Mechanic

If you are familiar with Photo Mechanic software from Camera Bits it is likely you are or were a photojournalist, sports photographer, stock photographer, photo editor or involved in another photo specialty where moving a lot of images quickly and accurately through your system was of paramount importance.

If you’re not familiar with Photo Mechanic (PM), you may be surprised to discover in this world of software bloat where programs try to be all things to all users, the developers of PM have spent time perfecting the program to do only a few simple things—but to do these extremely well. Photo Mechanic at its most basic level is simply a browser for still and video files.

But you already have Bridge or Lightroom or Aperture, so why do you need PM? Because Photo Mechanic is the fastest file importing and browsing program ever. Even if you are not dealing with a large volume of files, but need to accurately caption files on import and then move them along for processing, PM is the program to use.

PM is so fast with the latest computers that you will likely find that all of your images have been imported (“ingested” in PM-speak) and tagged with metadata before you have made much progress in editing the shoot. I use “editing” here and throughout this review in the photojournalistic sense—selecting and tagging/rating the best images. PM is not an image editor in the sense that it allows you to make adjustments to images, although you can send images directly to Photoshop from within PM.

Nor is PM a RAW processor, although images can be passed directly to Adobe Camera Raw from within PM. What PM does is allow you to almost instantly view your RAW files for editing by loading the JPEG preview rather than decoding the actual RAW data. And PM supports all of the popular RAW file formats including DNG. Version 4.6.4 adds new support for RAW files captured by the popular Olympus E-P2 and E-PL1 cameras, as well as the beginning of support for Phase One models and recognition of extended range ISO values (Lo and Hi) for Nikon cameras like the D3s. It also adds the ability to split still images from movie files during ingest to aid the import of video clips into Final Cut Pro using Canon’s EOS Movie plugin-E1 and various bug fixes.

There are only two screen views in Photo Mechanic, the Contact Sheet and the Preview screens. The Contact Sheet view is the core of PM and consists of a display of thumbnailed images from a particular folder. You can create Contact Sheets from more than one folder, and either keep them separate or combine them into one Contact Sheet view.

For most file formats, each thumbnail can be quickly enlarged into a Preview screen where the image can be zoomed up to 800% to check critical sharpness. Images may be cropped and a right-click context sensitive menu allows export of the image in various ways, like FTP to a server, e-mail, Save as JPEG, etc. Images may be viewed 2-up for a side-by-side comparison.

Since the introduction of PM in 1998, Camera Bits has provided both incremental and major updates as needed and in response to user requests. Updates are generally free for a year after purchase. In fact, I began reviewing PM v4.6.4 less than a week ago, and I just saw that v4.6.6 is now available!

These constant updates may all be familiar to PM users, but those new to PM will have a learning curve in order to simply get started with Photo Mechanic. It begins with understanding the extensive Preferences. The learning curve is eased somewhat by the manual and built-in Help, but I found areas where these were out of sync with the current release.

There is also a very useful Forum section on the PM Web site, www.camerabits.com, if you have an issue or need help with the program. It seems other users were stumped by the same issues regarding reading IPTC and XMP metadata from files that were previously processed in Adobe software. The answers to all my questions were available on the Forums—other users seem to have had the same questions.

I add IPTC metadata to all my files on import. At a minimum this includes copyright, contact and job information. Often I update this with information specific to an image or set of images. Adobe doesn’t seem to think this is important to photographers, so the tools Adobe provides in Lightroom make it a chore and I have complained about this in past reviews. While adding IPTC metadata is never fun, PM makes it far faster and easier than anything else on the market. The ability to fill in IPTC fields using PM far exceeds the needs of anyone other than a photojournalist on deadline, so you can be assured that it will do anything you need. It takes about 40 pages (25%) of the PM manual to walk you through all of the possibilities, so I won’t even try here.

I found two other features of Photo Mechanic useful for my work, Live Ingest and Lightroom integration. Live Ingest allows you to capture images either tethered or wirelessly directly to your computer. Lightroom does this also, but then I end up with a lot of files in Lightroom that I really don’t want there. I did find that PM required pressing the forward-slash key (“/”) in order to refresh the screen after each new RAW capture.

With PM I end up with the same set of files, but I can quickly choose my selects, add IPTC metadata, and even crop them in PM. Then by pressing the F3 key in PM I can show just my selects, copy them and drag and drop them into Lightroom. The Lightroom Import dialog opens and you end up with only your select images in Lightroom. The PM metadata, rating and crop carry over into Lightroom. Incidentally, the F3 key is only one of many keyboard shortcuts in PM that speed the process. The ability to integrate with Lightroom in this way is very useful. Unfortunately, image adjustments made to files in Adobe products are not reflected back into PM until the file is exported in Lightroom because Adobe does not store the changes in the JPEG preview of the file that PM reads. However, if you change the IPTC metadata in Lightroom, the changes will carry back into PM if you check the “Automatically write changes into XMP” in the Metadata tab in Edit>Catalog Settings of Lightroom.

The developers of Photo Mechanic have focused on the image importing, viewing, editing and exporting workflow and created a program that is unparalleled in its speed and flexibility. A 20-day free trial is available at www.camerabits.com. MSRP of the full program is $150 when downloaded or $160 with media delivery.

Stan Sholik is a commercial/advertising photographer in Santa Ana, CA, specializing in still-life and macro photography. His latest book, Professional Filter Techniques for Digital Photographers, covering both on-camera analog and post-production digital filters is published by Amherst Media.