It allows photographers an easy way to import, tag, and rate photos rapidly. Photo Mechanic 6 is a third-party app produced by Camera Bits. In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at how it can make your life easier. Photo Mechanic can help you get a handle on unwieldy amounts of photos, where other photo editing apps like Lightroom fall short. You may be reluctant to add another photo application to your flow, but Photo Mechanic is, without a doubt, the one tool that can streamline your image processing workflow. But what if we told you there was a way to make this task more manageable with a tool called Photo Mechanic? As it stands, Photo Mechanic beats other programs for speed, but for working in a creative field, feels a bit too clinical.If you regularly take hundreds (or even thousands of photos), you know all too well the frustration of sifting through the images. ![]() It is just not that fun to use, and other programs provide the same wealth of features with a light box view and a better color treatment for the actual interface surrounding your photos. But this is also the program’s main detriment. I mentioned how the lack of pizzazz in the program is in many ways a plus-it means your images pop off the screen against a dull old-school Windows background. I loved the speed and the agility of the program. As a writer and a photographer, I’m constantly organizing shots into groups and preparing them for submission with articles, or just organizing photos for my hobby side as a photo enthusiast. The conclusion I came to while working with Photo Mechanic is that I would not rely on this tool for my own photo workflow. In Photo Mechanic, you can create pads that you use to apply the data to a collection of photos. IPTC is the tagging format that photojournalists use when submitting photos. (You may have thought at this point that there were at least a few effects you can apply to images, but there really are none available other than simple re-sizing and cropping.) Before the upload, you can do some extra tasks such as convert Raw to DNG and use a “code replacement” feature that adds new caption and keyword data to a series of images in batch. Once you have applied keywords and IPTC data, the last step in the photo workflow is to upload images to a photo service. Photojournalists I’ve met who use Photo Mechanic swear by the efficient processing of this data the program is designed for speed and helping you fill out these fields so you can submit your work and move on, but that also means that if you do not work with IPTC data, the features are not that useful. There is also a way to take a kind of “snapshot” of an existing photo with IPTC data embedded and use that as a pad. ![]() ![]() It uses a paradigm called a Stationery Pad where you can fill in a form that includes fields for country designation, photo credit, and GPS coordinates and then save that pad for working with other contact sheets. ![]() You can apply IPTC data to any image, but Photo Mechanic goes a step further. Interestingly, while you see plenty of EXIF data, I did not find as many options for editing the camera properties of a photo as you can easily do in Lightroom and other programs. The program separates the more hardcore IPTC tags (such as the exact photo credit you want to use when an image is published) used by photojournalists from the more basic keyword tags (such as who is in the shot). There is not much artistry here, since the program lacks flare, but keyword tags certainly work quickly and efficiently.įor a streamlined, no-frills workflow, these features work smoothly and won’t distract you from the task at hand. Photo Mechanic uses a keyword window where you can tap in the metatags you want to use and apply them to individual shots or to entire collections en masse. Once you have created contact sheets, previewed images, and used the right-click menu to work with images at a purely organizational level, you can continue on to the next step, which is really all about tagging. Photo Mechanic uses a familiar paradigm from the pro photographer realm: you create contact sheets that look like the hard copy versions to organize your collections.
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