# Photo Mechanic on sale, $90 off.



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

Linky



> What is Photo Mechanic? Photo Mechanic is a standalone image browser and workflow accelerator that lets you view your digital photos with convenience and speed. Photo Mechanic displays your "thumbnails" in a familiar "contact sheet" display window. Photo Mechanic helps you find the best photo amongst several similar shots in a preview display that lets you flip through a group of selected photos at high resolution.
> 
> Photo Mechanic's super fast browsing enables you to quickly compare multiple images and select the best ones from a sequence. Its powerful batch processing, full support for image variables, IPTC and Exif metadata, make it the perfect tool for any digital photographer.


We use this for our event photography, great for working in batches.

Recommended.


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## kps (May 4, 2003)

Heard a lot of good things about this software, but was reluctant to pop the full price for it. I can get most of this done with LightRoom, albeit at a more...ehmmm..leisurely pace.

But for $90 off, I broke down and bought it.


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## Max (Sep 26, 2002)

Can you use it to look at, say, a Lightroom library? 'cos otherwise, I'd have to change my workflow (again!) to even give it decent trial run.


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## boukman2 (Apr 6, 2009)

i am downloading their demo, but what, briefly, would be any advantages of photo mechanic over aperture or lightroom?


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## kps (May 4, 2003)

I'm pretty sure it doesn't read LR catalogs, so it will not display LR modifications if you display a folder of LR modified images which were not saved as standalone versions such as psd, jpg, tiffs, etc.

You would use this prior to using LR/Aperture/Photoshop.

The advantage of Photo Mechanic is it's speed...it's practically instantaneous and many pros use it prior to LR, etc. to transfer images, cull images, flag images and/or sort images. Comes in very handy in instances when there's more than one photographer during an event and it's necessary to sort images from both based on capture time to create a time line. You import/transfer, cull, sort, etc, then import/edit in LR, photoshop, etc.


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## Max (Sep 26, 2002)

OK, that's cool. I'm about to start on a new production Monday and the camera will doubtless be getting a workout. Maybe I should spill the coin and grab it while I can. I certainly like the idea of fast displaying so that I can cull stuff before it comes into LR.

Thanks for the tip and info, gents!


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## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

kps is right, it's very fast for viewing. It is best used at the importing images stage. You can sort, strip EXIF, flag, rename, backup, resize, etc.

If you have multiple card readers it will read images & import all of them concurrently.

How we use it is to import images to one hard drive & automatically backup to another. Then, we use it to downsize the originals to about 30%.

After that, we send the smaller files over the network to our viewing stations. The advantage to downsizing is that over a 100Base-T network (G4 Mini's) the files get to the viewing stations much faster, the (relatively) smaller hard drive won't fill up during some of our bigger events & the software we use for viewing doesn't choke on a large image size.

PM does much more so we're hardly even breaking the surface.


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## KC4 (Feb 2, 2009)

Woot! Thanks FeXL.
It's just what I have been looking for..so I bought it.


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