Hi all

Do any off you use Photo Mechanic software?

I like to know is it any good for archiving your photos and how fast it with your work flow? Is it better than Lightroom?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks

Brian

PM is the first tool, even before Adobe's Products. I like the IPTC Stationery Pad, fill in keywords (copyright info etc, is already there). I used it for sorting out/ranking the images. Selection of a class or a tag is easy. When delivering images, I can save (in batch) to website images (with many options) and renumber, strip EXIF data, apply IPTC Stationery Pad. For me this tool is the fastest for these things. But: it's how you work, and how much work you have.
I really like that I do not have to import anything and there's no Database that fills up.

I know a lot of people use it to cull their images since it's way way faster than LR for that purpose alone.  I used it briefly and was impressed how fast it was.

One of the cool things is after you've ranked and filtered your selections, you can just drag-and-drop into LR so you don't have to wait for LR to generate the previews on all the images.  Just the ones you've selected.

I use Capture One, but, if I was a LR user and take thousands or even hundreds of images per shoot, especially if time was of the essence, I'd buy it.

Photo Mechanic is the gold standard for photojournalism and sports shooters.  It's incredibly fast and works well at ingesting and sorting large quantities of images.  As others have mentioned, it is also great at handling metadata. 

My basic workflow is ingesting/downloading with PM, culling and sorting with PM, editing with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop, then running the final images through PM to fill in IPTC data before outputting to the client.

I don't use LR, so I can't do a direct comparison.  I know it doesn't have the same presets or filters as LR. On the rare occasions I need to batch process, I just create a Photoshop action or a Camera Raw preset.

I started using it as a photojournalist and decided it was worth keeping as I shifted to commercial work.  It works great for my workflow, but everyone's needs are different.  I think they have a fully unlocked, time-limited trial version if you want to try it.

PM isn't good for catalogue management or editing, but it's phenomenal for initial importing, keywording, cropping and basic functionality. Here's a quick discussion of how I use it to augment my LR workflow:

https://happydragonphotography.blogspot … thout.html

basically it speeds up my importing, culling, metadata adding and cropping pre-LR import, but I use LR for hard core editing and management.