If you’re familiar with Photo Mechanic, you’ve heard of the Ingest feature, which is how you import images into the program. For instance, now you can rotate photos to any angle or add non-integral crop ratios to your shots, and they’ll be replicated in Adobe Camera RAW. With version 5, some new photo-cropping functionality has been added to the program but it’s for compatibility reasons. Unlike Lightroom and Aperture, which seem to continually add editing functions, Photo Mechanic isn’t a photo editor at all.
RAW conversions can always be done later by those back at the office with the big computer screens. Sports photographers and photojournalists, who tend to be the biggest users of Photo Mechanic, care less about that since time is of the essence when covering a news event in the field. The disadvantage of using an image browser like Photo Mechanic though is that you’ll need to convert those RAW shots later in another program. With Photo Mechanic 5, I was able to drop a huge file of thousands of RAW and JPEG images onto the program and have them all pop up quicker than I could scan through them. The speedy core of the program, which quickly generates previews of high-res images by using a JPEG proxy file embedded in the RAW, remains the same. While for years, new versions of Photo Mechanic crept along as incremental updates-the last one I reviewed was 4.6.5 in 2010-the small Portland, Oregon-based company that produces the software, Camera Bits, finally released Photo Mechanic 5 and it’s added helpful new features without drastically altering the program. And, for many photographers, particularly sports shooters, Photo Mechanic performs many more timesaving tricks than Bridge. But you know what? Even though I love me some Adobe Bridge, Photo Mechanic still whips its butt when it comes to speed.
Unlike Lightroom and Aperture, Photo Mechanic is not a RAW image converter-it’s just a photo browser that’s more of a direct competitor to Adobe Bridge than anything else. Of course, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. What do I like about this almost cultish photo browser that has similar functionality to the better-known Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge and Apple Aperture? It’s that Photo Mechanic is just flat out fast, letting me open and review an entire library of high-res images (including RAW files) while those other programs are still starting up. One piece of software, however, that I find myself returning to again and again, even though I have other good imaging programs that do sort of the same thing, is Photo Mechanic. It’s gotten to the point where I can tell ten minutes into the user experience whether a program is something I would use on a regular basis or if I should just delete it immediately from my hard drive.
#PHOTO MECHANIC 5 SOFTWARE#
In my line of work, I receive tons of software programs to test out: some of them good, some of them redundant and much of them, unfortunately, total crap.
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