When I first purchased Photo Mechanic, I wondered why I waited so long. Between the images I take of my five children and the busy summer wedding season, Photo Mechanic has become something I can’t live without. I am able to manage my images almost effortlessly and it is always the first step in my editing workflow. It literally saves me hours of time.
Photo Mechanic is a stand-alone program that makes browsing through your RAW (or jpeg) images lightning fast. My favorite feature is the ability to zoom in on my images with no lag time. I can instantly see the focus in my image or quickly check the expression on my subject if they are farther away. You can view the full resolution of your photos (up to 800%!) almost instantaneously. It may sound like a silly thing, but just those few seconds of time it saves per image add up to hours in the long run.
Being able to instantly see the full resolution images isn’t the only thing Photo Mechanic can do, of course. It also can change metadata, adjust time differences, rename files, move files, compare images side by side, add keywords and even add GPS coordinates to a single or group of images. It has so many useful features.
Another feature I love is being able to tag with colors. The color tagging method is what I personally use to cull my images and mark the ones I would like to keep. As I look through my images, I tag the ones I am going to keep using a keyboard shortcut. I quickly scroll through with the arrow keys and then assign a color to the images I want to keep. When I am finished going through all the photos, I have the program move just those ‘keeper’ images into their own folder. I love how easy it is to separate the images I will use from the images I will not use. From there, I import my images into Lightroom and continue with my editing workflow.
Photo Mechanic is compatible with both Macs and PCs and with their 30-day free trial you can try it for yourself to see if it fits into your workflow. The price of Photo Mechanic is $150 – well worth it, in my opinion.
