Photo Mechanic 6: Faster, Improved UI, More Compatible

Photo Mechanic 6: Faster, Improved UI, More Compatible

Camera Bits has announced that a major new version of Photo Mechanic is on its way to being released March 25.

It's been a long time since we've seen a new version release, with Photo Mechanic 5 making its debut in August 2012. Known for its speed, Photo Mechanic is a media browser that makes photo ingesting, viewing, culling, tagging, and exporting faster than using giant catalog-based editors like Lightroom and Capture One. Event photographers that work in wedding, sports, and journalism fields benefit from having a media browser like this that can cull thousands of images shot in a short time span. In my own trial runs, I've found it to be a good tool to cull bird and wildlife photos where I will heavily use continuous burst shooting.

The new Photo Mechanic 6 has been rewritten to be 64-bit compatible which, as Camera Bits said, ensures "you won't be left behind by OS updates." It features an improved user interface that will be more compact and streamlined. Camera Bits also teased that it would be two to three times faster at displaying thumbnails. Finally, one new feature that has been announced is the ability to ingest photos from a selection of images on a memory card.

Pricing for Photo Mechanic 6 will be $139 for a new license, $89 to upgrade, and free upgrades to those who purchased Photo Mechanic in the last year. The release date is set for March 25, and Camera Bits plans to share more about the new version as time grows near.

Ryan Mense's picture

Ryan Mense is a wildlife cameraperson specializing in birds. Alongside gear reviews and news, Ryan heads selection for the Fstoppers Photo of the Day.

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10 Comments

looking forward to it. I am on PM5, amazing tool, but the interface was just sick poor according to 2019 standards. The time saved with PM is counted in hours for editing/culling each year, and those 2-3$ per minute saved on workflow makes it a real saviour.

Glad to hear they worked on more than just 64bits and made it a bit more User Friendly with the UI.

THE missing feature to me is finally being implemented! "One of the most requested features from users is now standard in Photo Mechanic 6: The ability to pick exactly what files get ingested from your memory card. Why did we do this? If you guessed that we did it to help make you faster, well... you're quick!"

I’m not sure what they mean by this? It’s already pretty convenient by using the lock feature in camera?

Photo Mechanic is one of the most underrated and useful pieces of software on any of our computers. Looking forward to the release and upgrading to PM6.

Faster? Holy crapcicles, in 5 I can’t bang the arrow keys faster than it can render next image.

You listening Adobe? Giving us all the nifty tools nobody needed until you tell us we do.

I love PM, all jobs are previewed, tagged and rated there so that the decrepit Lightroom has a chance of processing files before I retire.

PM is my swiss army knife. Resize and sharpen to that size, watermark, make duplicates for web, cull, batch rename, just to name a few. It is indispensable in my work flow.

For people that don't use this software, or, have never heard of it, you're really missing out.

On large workflow piles such as a sporting event where it's not uncommon for you to have over 1000 images to cull in one sitting, this is priceless. The speed in which you can preview and tag images as finals is beyond anything else out there today. And although I'm not a Lightroom subscriber and have never properly used that for post work, I have a feeling that some integration has been made to work with it.

Although I've used this program since it's very early years, I'm not giving you a jaded or slanted point of view here. In media rooms across the globe, there isn't one fella that isn't culling with this. From major league baseball park, NHL arenas, even the Olympics, every shooter counts on this piece of software to make deadline or get the images out to the wire ASAP and we could never do it in time without this.

If you use bridge or Lightroom to cull, add metadata you need to try this and step up your game.

Although not shooting a lot sports at this time I may still purchase this just for the viewing and culling abilities. I lost access to my favorite image viewer, FastStone Image Viewer, when switching from pc to mac. It is freeware and a great viewer and file handler. You can tag and copy, etc. Super fast.

Just upgraded and the ability to FINALLY rename and play Sony A9 movie files is worth the upgrade.

Just posted my in-depth review, with speed benchmarks: https://wasabiphotography.com/for-photographers/photo-mechanic-6-whats-new