Reviews of Photo Mechanic (CameraBits)

Photo Mechanic :

Pros:Nested folders now supported, as is structural keywords. The best photo organizing and captioning software there is.

Cons:No catalogue database backend, but this is coming.

Very popular for pros. Interface "looks like something coming from Windows 98", but this is traded off with speed. Very fast. Has great rating system, editable EXIF and a big histogram.

Another user states that it is not a real organizer as you can't assign categories and subcategories, which is often very important.

• Sequential renaming. It's important coz wire agencies send picture in sequence (SEP101, SEP102...) to keep track of the number of pictures sent.
• Full screen browsing. It's important to see it at full screen so you know it is truly focused, sharp or not.
• Built-in FTP. It's a dream come true man. I can caption five pictures and send them out immediately. It even keeps track of failed transmission. So if I had 2 pictures that were not transmitted, PM would notify me. Click "refresh" and pics which failed in transmission will be re-sent.

• No cataloging feature. I can embed IPTC but I can't search according to IPTC tags.
• Our biggest complaint with Photo Mechanic is that it will not see into "nested" folders, in the same way it is possible with FotoStation.

• I can see that many of PMs features are very beneficial to journalists... Perhaps not so much for we shooters in retail. Yes, I basically need a giant light table were I can pick and choose, moving images to subfolders, renaming in batches, rotating in batch with direct action to those images within the folder being worked with. To jump from folder to folder and back, without tedious rebuilds of the thumbs each time. I'm getting the picture that PM may not be my solution.
• In my situation iptc captioning is critically important and Photo Mechanic is unbeatable with this in mind.
• It would be nice if they took it upon themselves to create a cataloguing software that keeps all the exif and keyword info intact, keeps the color code info, appends changes to the picture - not just a database, has the speed of photomechanic, the same logical approach and burns across multiple cd's or dvd's

• Image browser without central database.
• Importing from drives with several folder hierarchy options
• Batch renaming. Very limited capabilities. No pattern matching, a number of metadata macro fields but very limited sequencing options. Has several modes for resolving naming conflicts (appending digits or letters).
• FTP. Can perform some image modifications and apply IPTC stationery prior to uploading photos to an FTP server.
• Email. Emailing of photos relies on POP connection, does not support web-based email accounts.
• Color managed. Can embed color profiles to images.
• Web. Very basic web page creation. Doesn't appear to support much modification through templates.
• Easy marking of quality ratings through "color classes". Different colors used to indicate ratings or classifications for your images. Only supports 8 classes.
• IPTC. Can set up an IPTC stationary pad which is then applied to a series of photos. Very strong support for IPTC metadata.
• Thumbnail display. Thumbnails can be set to any size. Sort order can be specified on any metadata field, allowing both a primary and secondary field to be sorted. Doesn't appear to allow full custom order (ie. manually sorted).
• Documentation. Seems to be quite limited.