I've used Photo Mechanic for years to import, cull, rate, and add information to my photos before adding the keeper photos to Lightroom. The feature that originally drew me to Photo Mechanic was that I could be going through full sized previews as fast as I wanted to cull while the rest were still downloading. There is no waiting for previews. Marking the photos to cull did not slow down the import.

Honestly, I've watched about 10 videos on this subject and your is the first one that's made me actually want to use Photo Mechanic now. Thanks. Less waffling and straight into, "This is how you do it". Thank you again.

@EspenHelland

2 жыл бұрын

Cheer Roy, glad you enjoyed it!

@LM-xz1rc

Жыл бұрын

I'm with you! I have kept putting it off and finally a very clear, simple understanding of how it works.

Love the video when you go taking pictures. Awesome!

Another thought... I've been an ACDSee user for a long time. Photo Studio Ultimate 2021 is a product that integrates the functionality of Photo Mechanic, Lightroom and Photoshop for a significant lesser cost! Subscription is about $60/yr after the initial purchase cost. The Manage mode shines as a photo management tool and uses the file system to store images and a separate database to manage the metadata. The Develop mode is very similar to Lightroom - the Light EQ mode is a very quick way to balance and adjust the colours in a image. Edit mode is a layered editor like Photoshop. In general it's functionality is not as comprehensive as the Adobe Suite but it's more than good enough for me.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Good tip!

Neat little workflow, Espen. I struggled for a while to find a tool that will reduce culling time. Photo Mechanic seems pretty solid.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Cool, thanks

It's great to see a birder give a demo of the workflow in Photo Mechanic. I have seen lots of videos of portrait or wedding photographers show their workflow it's great to see yours. Culling is the biggest pain for me in my image creation process getting through it quickly is key. Thanks for this video full of great info and great shots! Cheers.

Great to see. Thank you!

Lots of pro sports photographers seem to use this and I want to break into that field. Love your channel. So I'm preempting my viewing with a thanks for the vid because I believe in you. 😛😂

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

🤣 Thanks appreciate it!

Great video I have used Photo Mechanic for a few years now started to use it when shooting football (soccer) was amazing for culling captioning and adding info to images

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Cool! I should probably start adding more info in PM

Thank you this was really helpful. My LR is a mess....and my photos. I can't wait to use this and start culling!

I like the color code option. Thanks Espen.

Won't use (any) Adobe anymore, but I have relied on PM for years, it's the best. The fast jump to a photo editor of choice directly from PM is appreciated. Very fast and efficient flow in use, I would say it's a program I get the most from, especially considering the reasonable cost, and the creator dedication (updates/improvements) that have come with it in my years of using. Good stuff, love your channel!

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Interesting, Adobe can definitely get pricey! Cheers Jan

@peterjohnson1739

3 ай бұрын

I really don't understand your comment. Having seen a couple of videos advocating the use of Photo Mechanic I checked the cost. It came as a shock, because PM costs more than the Adobe Photographers plan which gives you both LightRoom and Photoshop. I'd been expecting it to be much less expensive. Both PM and Adobe are subscription models. As far as I can see PM doesn't do anywhere near as much for you as Lightroom & Photoshop.

We wish we were out at the lake taking pics with you! But this is the next best thing :-)

I use a similar process but I use Adobe Bridge. It works great. Thanks for sharing your process.

Hi Espen! Thanks for this workflow tip! While I cannot use Photo Mechanic on my Linux platform, the workflow is definitely something I can adopt. I found that my image viewer of choice (a tool called "geeqie", which supports my Panasonic Lumix camera M43 raw format) supports a variety of scoring/marking techniques. This will allow me to use the same basic idea of culling through my pile before I import everything into Darktable. Thanks again, this is extremely useful info! Cheers, Jan

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks for sharing!

Unless you are shooting RAW only, there is a way to significantly speed up LR import plus creation of 1:1 previews: - uncheck "Treat JPEG files next to raw files as separate photos" in Preferences | General tab - uncheck "Replace embedded previews with standard preview during idle time" in in Preferences | General tab - set Build Previews to "Embedded & Sidecar" in Import Dialog, File Handling This will make a P1234567.JPG the preview for P1234567.ORF, with no extra processing effort. Time for 100 images on my system: 20sec, before I can start culling and even pixel peep at 100% if required. If you don't want to keep the JPGs, you can delete them from your HDD later and resync the folder in LR.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Good tip Karsten!

Espen, for what you are using PM for, Fast Raw Viewer is a probably better option. FRV works just as fast (if not faster), and it has better tools to check sharpness and exposure (including showing a Raw histogram). It doesn't allow you to compare images (coming in version 2, but with no release date). Unlike PM it builds previews rather than using the embedded jpeg, which is very small with Olympus cameras so FRV has an advantage in assessing quality from any camera that creates small embedded previews (which includes Sony, Fuji and Olympus). Having said that, you are currently only scratching the surface of Photo Mechanic. If you use PM to ingest the files from your SSD it has very flexible and powerful renaming tools (e.g. I include the last three characters of my camera body serial number in the file name to identify the body and avoid file naming clashes), and it has very powerful captioning and key-wording tools. Plus a whole range of miscellaneous capabilities that makes it a "photographers" swiss army knife. Although, this isn't "exactly" what I do, my basic workflow is to ingest files from the SSD, using PM, into the same file structure I will eventually import from into Lightroom. I use FRV to do a cull similar to the one you describe, and then go back to PM for captioning and keywording, and then import the files into Lightroom. The FRV people suggest you can do the initial tagging with the files still on the SSD (nothing is written to the SSD) and then select only tagged files to copy onto your computer (and then format the SSD, after the files are backed up of course). If you are doing wildlife where large numbers of images might be discarded in the first cull, this can also save worthwhile amounts of time. FRV is also a lot less money than PM.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Great tips Graham! Not heard of Fast Raw Viewer, thanks.

Thanks for all the great videos. I'm on a PC and use acdsee photo ultimate for management and it allows you to do this very same process very quickly as well. Still you have to discipline yourself to go through it regardless of the tool. I am hopeless and have several drives to go through. Ouch.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Great tip!

Interesting workflow Espen - currently I use lightroom to mark as rejected (X) or rated (1), then delete rejected and maybe go through the rated another time before ending up with a set to actually edit / keyword... I can see how this is slicker because my method does start with an import of everything into LR and that's often a time-consuming step!!

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah, I usually would find the import to Lr quite time consuming, and then it always seem to take a bit of time to load the image properly. Hope you're doing well Geoff, any projects lined up when we get out of lockdown? hopefully get out ;)

@GeoffCooper

3 жыл бұрын

@@EspenHelland I've found the initial time outlay to make 1:1 previews in LR (set it going, go do something else!) is worth it for a smoother experience going through the images afterwards, but definitely agree that having a mechanism to cull the trash images before doing that is more efficient! All well thanks, plenty of ideas and plans but will continue to be mostly local (and infrequent) for a fair while baby (currently 6-months) to entertain ;)

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

@@GeoffCooper ahh! Must be difficult to find anytime. A very late congratulations!

@GeoffCooper

3 жыл бұрын

@@EspenHelland thanks :) Yeah, free time is something of a mythical beast now but it’s pretty awesome!!

I love Photo Mechanic. I use it a little bit different than you. I pick out the ones I like with red, then filter out the ones in red and delete the rest of the images. I do a second round, and I do the opposite by deleting the ones I don’t like instead of marking the one I like. I hope that makes sense.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Absolutely! Thanks for sharing

Hello Espen! I have been using Photo Mechanic for a while for culling and also find it quite useful, time is precious, though I use the colour red for keeps :-)

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

That's just wrong ;)

Hi Espen: Thanks for creating and sharing this material from your workflow. My existing LR catalogue is approximately 230,000 images from over 20 years of shooting and I must admit that I have a very large portion of images that need to go, so I have purchased Photo Mechanics 6 Plus to accomplish this. I like your step of placing all of your images in a 'temp' folder before bringing them into LR. Time to go through my images and then rebuild LrC to few only my keepers. Do you use PM6 for keywording your final images in anyway? Regards, Keith

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Wow! That's a lot of images! I would have that too if I'd been shooting for 20 years :) No I haven't used it for keywording, I might start though as it's always more of an after thought for me. Always looking to improve the workflow

I actually use Lightroom. I import all and then use the reject button as I go through, before doing anything else. I then delete the rejects, using delete from disc. I thought this was pretty quick, but hadn’t thought about how long it takes to do the import. Food for thought there. Thanks

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah, my Lr seems to lag a bit when I go from photo to photo as well.

@malcolmfoo757

7 ай бұрын

It all really depends on your workflow. If you're shooting lots and need to do a quick selection of images, (e.g. journalist, select photos for wedding slideshows), photo mechanic is the faster way without the need of running a new computer like the M1 Macbook Pro as it processes the images (depending on your selection during the importing/ingesting process). If you actually have time in between like hours in between, you can just use Lightroom and import them during your break and select/tag the photos. Have fun and cheers!

Thanks for doing this video Espen, I’ve been meaning to check out Photo Mechanic for a while now after having heard quite a few people swear by it. Can you make basic exposure edits or anything? Sometimes, if I’ve exposed an image for the highlights, I might want to raise the exposure to check the detail and sharpness on the subject before doing a proper edit.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

No basic editing available no, there are some interesting suggestions in the comments that can be worth checking out.

I follow the same process as you. Either reject or keep. If in doubt, keep. If several in a sequence, keep some, most or a few for later. I often do a second pass through. The only difference is that I do this during Lightroom import, before I click the actual import. I remove or keep the check mark at the bottom of each image. When I finally get into Lightroom, now of later, I do serious comparisons, obvious keeps and maybes. For maybes I do a very quick adjustment to see its value. I make ever effort to remove redundant images and image that do not measure up . I definitely failed at his in the past, my catalog is testament to that. For the last 2 years I worked on being diligent, especially this past year. Bound at home because of the pandemic I took many times more bird photos than ever. I had gently of time to practice, learn and experiment. I has paid off. And it has definitely paid off when committed to be diligent about deleted images I don't need to keep. And time I go back into a folder, especially those that had a lot of images, I take time to be diligent again. I notice most of my files now only have a few image. Only a few have a lot, those special times when opportunity was bountiful. I still work to whittle it down to fewer images. Thanks for sharing your process.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

I have such a back catalogue to go through! Hoping I can keep it all tidier going forwards and deleting a lot more :)

I have been a Photo Mechanic user for year to ingest images. I do the selection process by tagging the potential keepers often right on the field, then filter on them to further cut them down. Once the final set of keepers are identified, I bring only the final keepers into Lightroom however I never bother deleting from the hard drive. Hard drives are cheap.

@EspenHelland

2 жыл бұрын

I already have way too many photos on my HD, can't imagine keeping all my crappy shots ;)

If you're an editorial photographer, such as a newspaper or sports shooter, you tend to make a lot of images and edit down afterwards. Things are happening fast, so you have to shoot first, select later. This means you end up with a lot of photos to sort through. Many are _extremely_ similar to each other, and you need to devote the necessary amount of time to selecting precisely the right one. The same seems to apply to stock photography. Images now sell through stock agencies for nickel-and-dime prices, even Rights Managed shots, so it has become a 'numbers game' - you need tens of thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - of photos on the market. If it's going to work out, you've got to be a prolific shooter, and that means editing and sifting through thousands of images... all the time.

@EspenHelland

Жыл бұрын

I tend to end up with thousands of images after using pro capture, really handy to delete 80% fast!

Good video. Does this work for ipad? Also, when shooting video what vnd filter are you using with your 300mm?

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Cheers, I don't think it works on ipad. I need to get a filter for filming video, it's on my to do list!

I use PM mainly for football and occasionally, airshows. There are so many different ways it can be used. I always add the iptc stationary pad prior to ingesting as you can use the variables to the folder you're ingesting to and, file renaming. I would like to see your next step of editing your keepers.

@EspenHelland

Жыл бұрын

I use it quite simply, probably lots more I could get out of it.

Oh I like this process. I have the same problem and have thousands of photos I’ve kept around in LR because I don’t have the time to muck with them after. I’ve never thought about this, but I do the same thing and keep images just in case when I do cull, in a series. Can you reverse the review process on the second pass to help identify those easier? So pass one is chronological and pass two, after you’ve culled out the easy ones, start from the end, which theoretically has better images in each series, that would now show up before the ones you kept “just in case”?

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Good idea, will try next time :)

Faststone image viewer is even faster! Press q to flag a picture. In roud two you unflag. Software is free

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Good tip!

@davidvdbroeck_nature8305

3 жыл бұрын

"Please follow me on instagram and hit the like button every time you like my picture " as you youtubers like to say. 😉

@hpeterh

3 жыл бұрын

I use it too. I often use the image comparison mode. It has all other features and can call an arbitrary amount of external editors. It is free for personal use only, but I think the price for professional users is neglectible.

I also find it much quicker to apply keywords in PM for the "keepers"

A video close to my heart at the moment just spent a couple of hours on Lightroom updates and deleting yesterday to make space for the arrival of the Sony A1 tomorrow! 50 MP twice my previous camera file size I need space. What does my computer hard drive store? I would swear I have photos stored on separate drives, anyone else have my MAC auto problems presets pre photo auto duplicates ?

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Oh! You're going to need lots of space :) !

I like photo mechanic too but as a hobbyist photographer, it is quite expensive to pay that subscription each year since I don’t get paid for taking photos so I think this is more for professional photographers who actually make money taking photos.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

I don't think it's a yearly subscription, but I agree it can be a bit too much to pay for a lot of hobby photographers.

@konstantinaksenov4850

2 жыл бұрын

The photomechanic is sold under a one-time license, and not according to a subscription model.

@peterjohnson1739

3 ай бұрын

@@EspenHelland Photo Mechanic is 46% more expensive than Lightroom and Photoshop bought together as a package. In the UK, today after the thirty-day trial (which would end on 2 Apr 2024), it would cost £145.36/year plus 20% VAT. That’s £145 for a professional photographer (who can claim back the VAT) and £175 for the amateur photographer (who must pay the VAT). By contrast, the Adobe Photography (20 GB) Plan costs £9.98/month [a figure that includes VAT] that’s £119.76 per year. I take your point that PM is faster but that's a huge amount extra to pay for that speed especially as it's extra to Lightroom (not instead of Lightroom). Also, I don't shoot anything like 1,000 photographs a day.

@peterjohnson1739

3 ай бұрын

@@konstantinaksenov4850 In the UK today (March 2024), I can only find Photo Mechanic on sale as an annual subscription that is 46% more expensive than Lightroom and Photoshop bought together as a package. It’s just too expensive to contemplate its use merely as a pre-possessor to Lightroom since it’s. not a replacement.

@EspenHelland

3 ай бұрын

@@peterjohnson1739 yeah it’s not for everyone, but it’s not a subscription so it should only be a one off payment not yearly.

Hi Espen, I sort my pictures in a similar way. I use Adobe bridge for this. I mark them like that. 1 * = delete 5 * = processed Green = needs to be edited Yellow = series of pictures Maybe it will help someone. Best regards Mario #mario_plechaty_photography

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Nice one Mario, thanks for sharing!

I find that Luminar 4 also makes it easy (and quick) to cull my ‘garbage images’ while staying in my library but accessing all downloaded files non - destructively while keeping my hard drive space lean. No extra program needed for those who prefer non subscription editor with substantial tools for post edits. 😃

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Good tip, not tried it

I need a good raw processor. Adobe raw crashes every time I try to adjust an image. Latest OS X or is it 11 now version latest Adobe Raw etc. Just started crashing after I updated to Big Sur.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Lots of tips in the comments for what people use 👍

have you tried c1? it goes much better with Olympus raws. a greeting.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

No haven't will try to look it up. Thanks!

Just from watching Espen I think I'll stick with adobe bridge it looks very similar and it is free

@CamillaI

3 жыл бұрын

Never really used Bridge but just updated it yesterday part of the package ! Is it easy to do ?🤔

@kenpowell3558

3 жыл бұрын

@@CamillaI for me it just took a bit of time to get it , now I find it easy

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Nice one, all that matters is finding something that works for you

It seems a lot like Olympus Workspace. What's the difference?

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

It’s very fast

@AkaiMiso

3 жыл бұрын

@@EspenHelland Thank you for the reply. I use Workspace just for import and culling. If it will save me lots of time, I better give Photo Mech a try. Thanks for your recommendation!

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

@@AkaiMiso I think you get a free trial, so best to check to see if it’s worth it to your workflow 👍

the shitty thing about PM is it does not write to exif. only xmp sidecars (so now i have to deal with another file) which is useless when you want to upload to places like google photos. really stupid on PM not have exif writeability.

Now I don't feel so bad about bringing sooo many images lol

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

😅 👍

Hey am I missing something? Why not just click “delete” instead of clicking “red”? Same number of clicks...and you have to go through all your images anyway either way.

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

You may be right, but sometimes I make mistake when moving fast and it's easier to go back and undo the colour rather than going to my trash and finding the image.

Hei, Jeg skjønner ikke hvorfor man skal markere de man skal slette, blir ikke det bare et ekstra trykk på tastaturet. Jeg bruker å slette alle som ikke er flagget, men mulig jeg har den uvanen med meg da jeg ikke har tid til å sitte slik under sportsarrangement og markere de jeg ikke skal ta vare på :-)

@EspenHelland

2 жыл бұрын

Hm, kanskje jeg bør prøve det istedenfor 👍 har lyst å ta vare på mindre bilder enn det jeg gjør!

No 300?

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

back now! :)

Sound quite low...

@EspenHelland

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks, will keep it in mind for next one