![]() ![]() In Photo Mechanic I go to File -> Ingest (or Command-G), then select the source, usually the memory card in a card reader. The template folder I duplicate and rename before importing To make life easy I keep a template folder in my Jobs folder currently called ’17-xxxx Template’ that contains these three sub-folders and before importing each job I duplicate that template folder and rename it appropriately. Inside each job-name folder I have three more folders: All Raws, Working Raws, and Client JPGs. I always import my photos to my hard drive in a folder structure that looks like this: User -> Pictures -> YYYY (e.g. While we were talking I realised it’s much easier to describe in writing and with pictures, so I figured I’d share on the blog. Photo Mechanic is made especially for ingesting, rating, adding metadata and all that stuff and saves so much time! Photojournalists and sports photographers swear by it, especially for the speed and the metadata aspect, but for simply ingesting and culling it’ll still change your life if you’ve been doing it all in Lightroom so far. So I told him about how I use Photo Mechanic to ingest and cull a shoot, and only then do I move the keepers to Lightroom for the next stage of the edit. Which it is! Lightroom is fine for importing a few photos but if you’ve got thousands of images from a wedding to download, doing the import and the first edit on Lightroom can take aaaages, even on a fast computer. He’d been using Lightroom for the whole shebang and was finding it very slow going. At the end of a sports season I’ll just trash everything outside of the selects file.Today I had a call from William, a fellow London wedding photographer, asking for a bit of advice on his importing workflow. Any Smart Collections previously established will pull in photos as usual, and I can create whatever new creations I need. The DNG process reduces file size but preserves editing flexibility and neatly packages all the metadata and ACR edits rather than screwing around with sidecar XML’s. With this I only import the selects into LR and thus don’t clutter up the catalog. ![]() Writing to DNG at this stage is faster than at import as fewer files to deal with.ħ) Drag the Selects folder into Lightroom, apply pick flags to all (LR doesn’t recognize PM’s tags) and from there it’s business as usual. At this point I then have a) an edited selects folder, and b) everything else without duplicates. When they’re done I go back to PM and delete all the tagged NEF versions. I’ll load a preset for all or do a group edit then quickly go through and fine tune individually.ĥ) With all of the images selected in ACR I then write them to DNG (with fast load data) in a new Selects sub-folder for that shoot. I find ACR is faster than Lightroom so this offers further time saving. Again, very fast.Ĥ) With all tagged selected I select edit which brings me into ACR. I’ve abandoned rejects selection at this point.ģ) Isolate just the tagged files and refine metadata for each. What I’ve ended up doing is a multi-stage process…ġ) Use PM to import card to computer, writing custom metadata at the time including use of variables for auto captioning.Ģ) Rip through just like in your video, but I tag my picks and rank 5-stars separately for the favorites. And as you indicate in the video the metadata elements are well beyond LR as well and again contribute to the speed factor using Variables in the meta process lets you easily create captions and headings from other meta fields without duplicating work. I’ve recently adopted PM for youth sports photography because of the speed element. Here’s the link to the NAPP Member website but you’ll have to sign in to see the code. NAPP members get a discount on Photo Mechanic. But trust me, I talk to plenty of wedding, portrait, landscape and street photographers out there that need (or simply just want) to go through their photos extremely fast at times, and this is a great way to do that. ![]() As I said in the video, if you watch this and think “But can’t Lightroom do all of that”, you’re absolutely right and using Photo Mechanic is probably not for you. I still use Lightroom for just about everything else (organizing, collections, editing, printing etc…), but Photo Mechanic works great (for me at least) when I need to look through hundreds of photos and check sharpness, and overall quality of the photo, very quickly. Mainly because it draws full size views of the photos blazingly fast. I realized that I (and many other photographers out there) use a program called Photo Mechanic to look through our photos at times. It came as an idea after reading Scott Kelby’s post on his sports photography workflow. I’m doing a little bit of a different kind of video this time. ![]()
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