First of all, a heads up:
After finishing this article I realised: It all might sound like a big advertisement for Photo Mechanic. But, honestly, I’ve been paid $0 to write this or make the video. I just love this application so much and I think you will too…
You can grab a 30-day trial of Photo Mechanic here (Mac & Windows). I reckon this article really only makes sense if you’re actually using the program on your end too.
OK, let’s get into it!
Photo Mechanic is a fast media browser that helps you view, organise, manage and export your digital photos and videos.
The minute you put down the camera, your post-processing workflow begins. The most productive photographers in the world use Photo Mechanic and it features to make managing photos faster and easier.
It allows you to quickly ingest/import photos from your memory cards and pick your favourites without having to wait.
It’s part of every single one of my photography workflows and I honestly couldn’t imagine it without it!
3 Reasons:
- it’s Fast! Lightning fast!
- it uses Variables…
- that Automate Tasks, so I can spend more time shooting and being creative with editing.
Don’t get me wrong; I love Lightroom! Photo Mechanic does not replace Lightroom. Instead, by adding Photo Mechanic to my photography workflow I halved the time I spend in working through my photos. And I have done so for the past 3 years!
Let me explain to you how!
The most powerful (and probably underused) feature of Photo Mechanic is Variables.
Variables are a set of data that Photo Mechanic can fetch from one location and automatically insert into any other location.
There are 3 sources for this data:
- Your camera and photos. All the data that’s already inside your RAW or JPEG file. Like shutter, aperture, ISO, GPS info etc.
- Data from your computer. local date, time etc.
- Any set of data you have entered in a field. for example your website URL
Anywhere in Photo Mechanic, you can open the Variable window to show a list of all available variables. And there are A LOT of them!
You can insert a variable into an input field by simply clicking onto the field and then double-clicking the variable on the list that you want to insert into this text field. It’s as simple as that.
I use this ALL OVER the application.
It’s a simple tool that can add a whole new level of information to your images in a systematic way that would otherwise cost you hours and hours of work.
Examples will follow later on.
Those words used to scare me when I was only using Lightroom. Looking through the photos I shot, marking the ones I want to delete or edit and then making sure everything keeps stays organised… it’s super time consuming when done in Lightroom.
Photo Mechanic makes all that FUN!
Photo Mechanic uses the embedded sidecar preview file of a RAW file (similar to Lightroom CC Classic these days) and instantaneously generates previews of the RAW files. However, it is MUCH FASTER than Lightroom and you won’t ever be spending time waiting for the file to load before you can check focus. ever. again.
Enough Praise. Here’s how it’s done:
I import all media through Photo Mechanic. As soon as I get back from a shoot I plug in my SD card and open up Photo Mechanic. The Ingest/Import Window will open automatically (or you can press CMD / CTRL + G on your keyboard to bring it up.
What seems quite overwhelming at first isn’t actually so bad. As you can see from my Ingest Window, I fully automate everything here. Once I set this up a few years ago I didn’t have to change anything since.
Using Variables I can completely trust in Photo Mechanic that things will end up in the right place and with the right folder and name structure.
My Folder Structure using Variables:
{iptcyear4}/{iptcyear4}-{iptcmonth0}-{iptcday0} – {country} – {headline}
My File Naming Structure using Variables:
EYREWALKER_{iptcyear4}{iptcmonth0}{iptcday0}_{countrycode}_{seqn}
The only thing I have to is to make sure that I’ve inserted the right country, headline and country code. And here’s how and where:
Before I click ingest I open up the IPTC Stationary Pad.
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) is based in London and is a consortium of the world’s major news agencies, other news providers and news industry vendors and acts as the global standards body of the news media.
The IPTC defined a set of metadata properties that can be applied to images, part of a broader standard developed in the early 1990s and known as the IPTC Information Interchange Model (IIM). Embedded IIM image information is often referred to as an “IPTC header”. This basic set of metadata fields is branded as IPTC Core, in 2008 a second set branded as IPTC Extension was developed. [Wikipedia].
To me: the IPTC stationary pad allows me to insert a whole range of information that will help me to brand, catalogue, organise and recognise my images from now on.
Again, I use Variables here to make this part of the import process as easy and quick as possible. While the initial setup of my IPTC stationary pad was a lengthy process, nowadays it takes no longer than 1min to fill in the fields before I get to the next step: Importing the files from the SD card.
Inside the IPTC stationery pad, I basically plaster my name, business and copyright information all over the file. While it’s not a bulletproof way of branding your work, it’s definitely an additional layer of security you can add. Unless purposefully removed, the data you enter here will always stick with the image. Even when exported as a low-resolution JPG from Lightroom and uploaded to Google.
Additionally, the more information you add to your images here, the higher the chance your work will be discoverable on the web. Keywords, GPS data, Copyright, business URL… all those things are indexed by Google and will make it easier to for others to find your photos.
Search for ‘Chris Eyre-Walker Photography’ on Google Images and you’ll see…
So, the most important field for me are the ones at the top:
- Headline (whatever I shot that day)
- Keywords (I’ll usually add a few that work for the whole shoot)
- City: (nearest city from where I shot the photos)
- Location (name of the place I shot the photos)
- State/Province
- Country
- Country ISO Code (Google is your friend…)
And that’s where my folders and file names get their data from. So I only have to type in the values in one place. Photo Mechanic takes care of the rest.
ALL OTHER FIELDS are always identical. I don’t touch them. Ever.
And that’s it. You don’t have to save the IPTC stationary pad. It always remembers its last status.
Now click on Ingest and watch Photo Mechanic do the magic.
While it’s importing I start looking through the files and I work my way from top to bottom. I press ‘1’ for 1 Star and T for Tag/Trash.
1 Star: Files I want to look at in develop mode in Lightroom
T : Files I can’t use and that is to be deleted.
Once I reach the bottom I go back to grid view and press CMD/CTRL + T to select all images that I’ve tagged with T. Right Click on one of them and Delete. Gone. Never to be seen again.
This is super easy!
Just select all files you want to import (CMD / CTRL + A) and drag them onto the Adobe Lightroom icon to launch Lightroom. The import window will open up automatically and you can now import the files to Lightroom.
Here I make sure that the files are ADDED (not moved) since they are already in the perfect file structure, and that I generate Standard + Smart Previews.
All the star ratings will be automatically visible in Lightroom. The import should be very fast too since the files aren’t being copied or moved, instead, they are simply added to the Lightroom Catalog.
From now on I will close Photo Mechanic and work through the files I’ve selected with one star in Lightroom. Each edited file gets an additional star. So I can filter by:
No Stars = unedited, probably not worth editing
1 Star = good, possibly worth editing
2 Stars = edited
I also go ahead and create collections for each shoot. So for example, this shoot would have at least a collection containing all files under:
COUNTRIES/ SLOVENIA / LAKE BLED + BOHINJ
If you do more changes in Photo Mechanic (add ratings, colours, labels or change any other Metadata) then the easiest way to bring those changes across to Lightroom is to right click on the folder containing the RAW files and selecting Synchronize Folder. This will not change your image edits btw.
If you prefer working with colour ratings instead of stars you can also do that in Photo Mechanic. For this to work with Lightroom you’ll first have to head to:
Photo Mechanic / Preferences / General
and click the little lightning icon on the right of the colour labels and select your version of Lightroom. Basically, the label names have to be the same as in Lightroom and it will work. Under:
Photo Mechanic / Preferences / Accessibility /
you can set the numbers of your keyboard to either represent the 1-5 stars or the colour labels.
And that’s it. I’ve just saved hours of work using this application.
As for you:
CameraBits, the guys behind Photo Mechanic offer a 30-day trial of the application. So do yourself a favour and give it a go. You’ll love it in no time. Especially if you’re like me and you prefer spending time with your camera and actually getting work done.
Feel free to copy my workflow and the way I use variables as seen in the screenshots. It’s an effective workflow that has saved me a ton of time and will do the same for you once you’ve got your head around Photo Mechanic.
Honestly, the one-off $150 payment for Photo Mechanic has paid off 100x over for me. The amount of time I’ve saved and the additional information it has added to my photos and how it’s made them and consequently me more discoverable on the internet has been worth it.
Like what I do? Consider supporting me on Patreon. Every $1 helps! And you get lots of cool extra additional stuff too: Early access, unique content, exclusive behind the scenes stuff…
Chris, they should give something to you also. Maybe to sponsor some of upcoming trips, or make you an ambassador of the brand for example 😉
Haha yes! Maybe they should… Anyway: I believe in giving before taking 😉
Hi Chris!
Fantastatic article showing once again the power of photo mechanic.
I have tried to get inspired by your way of organizing. I’m ingesting pictures with folders with date as you do. But trying to integrate the variables country and city doesn’t work for me… just stay blank.
I filled in the IPTC top right part… but doesn’t work.
Any idea what I did wrong?
Thanks
Thanks Marien,
It’s quite difficult to see what you might be doing wrong here. The most important part is to use the right variables in the right place and way. Insert a variable by clicking the field you want to insert it into, then double click on the variable you want and it should appear there with the square brackets around it: [variable]
If you want to use the IPTC variables you have to make sure you’re using the right category of variables. They are organised, and one of the category is ‘IPTC Fields’, make sure to use the ones from that category to get Photo Mechanic to pick the ones from the IPTC Stationary Pad.
Also, one last thing, make sure Photo Mechanic is applying the Local Stationary Pad (not the global one) on import. You can select that on the import window below the ‘IPTC Stationary Pad’ box.
I hope that solves it. But feel free to contact me directly by email if this doesn’t help.
– Chris
Chris, you might want to look more closely at what Lightroom can do on its own. For instance, you can specify a metadata template to apply to each photo as it’s imported, and it would be easy enough to customize this for each shoot. You can have it change the filename as it’s imported. And while it’s true that PhotoMechanic displays the Raws faster, there’s a reason for that: Lightroom is optimizing the preview according to your specifications. For instance, I like the JPEGs from my Nikon when they use the Portrait scene mode. So, I tell Lightroom (actually, Camera Raw, but it’s the same) to make the photo look like a Portrait JPEG from my camera as a starting point, as well as to get rid of chromatic aberrations and lens defects from a profile, and also to apply sharpening and noise reduction. All that goes into the preview! So, when it does show up, it’s a lot closer to what I want finally, and it’s much easier to evaluate.
Great! Super Tutorial. Photo Mechanic should reward you for this.
Great info/blog!
Thank You!
Great tutorial. I have tried to use photo mechanic on older folders on my hard drives. The files come up in the program and I can rate them and view them but when I select them and try to drag them to lightroom for the final edit nothing happens. If I type” command e” all the files in the folder will transfer not just the selected ones. Any ideas?
Hi Rick,
For me it works. I usually star the ones I want to import to Lightroom with 1 star and then at the end of culling filter the view in Photo Mechanic and select all and drag and drop them into Lightroom. It will then have the ones I tagged with one star selected for import and will ignore the others.
ciao Chris thanks for show this nice software….I like it, do you know if the licence include for 2 or 3 computers?
thank you in advance
marco
as it says on the Photo Mechanic website: You can use the one license on up to 3 computers. As long as you are the sole user of the application.
https://store.camerabits.com/products/photo-mechanic-6
Cheers
Chris
Hello Mr. Eyre-Walker and many thanks for the brilliant tutorial.
I am still working on a meaningful file naming convention combining general and unique components so images can be found via File Manager or Windows Explorer independently of applications like Lightroom or Aperture.
(I never should have allowed Aperture to manage the database because the folder and file names Aperture applied were meaningless when viewed outside of the Aperture environment via File Manager.)
Otherwise meaningless filename suffixes are retained so I can account for images captured in milliseconds in burst mode because – as far as I am aware – my cameras do not appear to record millisecond data.
I also tend to include camera make, model and serial number in the filename.
I am today using Photo Mechanic 6 for the first time attempting to set up a file naming convention using the terms described below.
{iptcyear4}/{byline}_{iptcdate}_{iptchour24}{iptcminute}{iptcsecond}_{filenamebase}_{make}_{model}_{serialnum}
Damn! Why did I download PM6 at midnight as getting to know the application is taking me into the wee small hours? 😱🤪 I’ll have to pick this up again tomorrow.
Seamus, Photo Magic has many buiilt in “Filters” and among these are filters for EXIF-variables. I once had a few folders with some camera model names on them and with PM I have found that’s a little bit of over kill adding that kind of info either to folders or files. It just will make them longer and more cumbersome to read I think. PM will automatically create a list of all camera models or lenses used in the indexed database you have created. These are then avaiable under “Filters” in the applications drop down lists, ready to be used.
As Chris writes you can use the variables in many places in PM’s forms, so even in the metadata info window always present if you just move the mouse over the images.
Thank’s Chris for this very well written article!
Do you ingest from PM to the same folder where you would import to if you were doing this process in lR alone? Does that make sense?
Yes. Although I use the features and functions of PM to create more specific and organised folders without extra effort. Things I have to do manually in Lightroom if I ingest only that way.