Is Photo Mechanic Plus a Lightroom Killer? An In-Depth Fstoppers Review Part 1: Importing Photos

Lightroom totally dominates the realm of digital asset management (DAM) — a solution to everything, it fits the mold of most photographic workflows. However, the bitter pill to swallow can be the treacle-like performance and that monthly subscription (something I've touched upon before). Photo Mechanic, renowned for its blisteringly fast performance, offers a new solution. Is it a Lightroom killer?

Digital asset management is something we all do as photographers — whether it's as simple as copying image JPEGs straight off an SD card and dumping them into a "Pictures" folder or fully integrating Lightroom into a workflow so that the raw files end up pre-tagged in date-named folders that are cloud-synced for anywhere access. The care you take will depend upon what you want to achieve and who you are delivering the images to. What is undeniable is that we are shooting more images than ever, using higher-resolution sensors that create larger files. This wealth of the visual is creating a data headache that affects all aspects of the photographic workflow, foremost among these is the size of the data archive. Back in film days, there was an upfront cost associated with creating an image: you paid for the film, the development, and the printing. There was a charge at every stage before you carefully indexed and filed your negatives. Digital was heralded as an almost "no-cost" solution; you already had a computer and just dumped those tiny JPEGs into a spare directory. With cameras such as Fuji's GFX 100 creating 100 MB+ size files, you need large media cards, an ultra-fast connection to your PC, storage, and a large backup solution. If, for example, you are a wedding photographer, shooting 2,000 images for a single event creates a significant data processing headache, all of which costs a considerable amount to set up and maintain.

Rapid Asset Management

As a result of a lot more larger image files, we are now seeing pressure on the software that manages those photographic assets; when files were small, there wasn't any imperative to seek high-performance processing, but this has become an obvious bottleneck. This is even more important for time-critical photography such as sports and news, where you can be required to upload your imagery literally seconds after having captured it. There is an acute requirement for Rapid Asset Management in these domains, but all areas of photography are seeing a need to be able to rapidly cull and catalog their imagery. Once you've culled, tagged, and keyworded your imagery, the import process then kicks in, which highlights a universal truth: copying your images is only as fast as the hardware you are using.

Once the images are actually on your computer, there are two broad approaches to processing them: simple batch-driven edits and more refined manual processing. The former benefits significantly from being integrated into the culling process, while the latter can more readily be driven externally (for example, in Photoshop). At one extreme, a sports photographer might shoot a ton of images, then rapidly cull them before automating batch edits and then uploading the results. A landscape photographer might only shoot 10 photos and manually copy and edit each one in Lightroom or Photoshop. Obviously, you can have anything in-between as well. If I'm shooting a wedding, then I might well want to both rapidly cull and upload initial imagery for the couple before returning later on for some more curated edits.

Rapid Asset Management (RAM) is relatively new, as most products have tended to offer image processing (e.g. Photoshop, Affinity Photo) on their own or with integrated cataloging (e.g. Lightroom, Skylum Luminar). Camera Bits sees a gap in this market, and Photo Mechanic Plus is its answer. So, what does it offer?

Photo Mechanic

The first thing to note is that Photo Mechanic is not a new product. In fact, Camera Bits founder Dennis Walker started the business in 1996, having become heavily involved in digital image processing early on. Realizing that culling, captioning, ingesting, and exporting were key workflows for photojournalists, he released Photo Mechanic in 1998 to help meet an industry need. The secret sauce — in addition to being sleek and fast — was to target as much of the process to the pre-import stage. As I noted above, the import itself is largely dependent upon your hardware, and as such, you can't speed that up. However, through both culling and automation, you can dramatically reduce both the total time taken to get to the photos you want, as well as importing and processing them. It's perhaps surprising that Lightroom hasn't better targeted optimizing the ingestion workflow in a similar manner; however, it remains that Photo Mechanic is both fast to process photos as well as blisteringly fast in its implementation, key traits for anyone that shoots a lot of photos. Let's take a look at a few of these aspects in more detail (note that Photo Mechanic is available for Windows and macOS, although the former requires the installation of gStreamer to view video files).

The starting point is to open a contact sheet by pointing it at a memory card that's plugged into your PC (Photo Mechanic can ingest from multiple card readers at the same time). Instantly (literally instantly), all the thumbnails will display on-screen with associated metadata. You have a choice at this point to either ingest (PMP's terminology for importing) all the photos to your hard drive or undertake the tagging on the card. Working with the card has some speed benefits, but you are obviously working with the original imagery (not a copy).

Double-click on an image to load a full-size preview, then let the keyboard shortcuts take control: z to zoom, then v to compare photos (o to return to single shot), and e to edit in your default software editor. The key to this process is tagging. The number keys can be used to star (Alt-<number>) or color code images (Shift-<number>). For speed, you can use the number keys directly to set star or color rating (and can change the default in Preferences->Accessibility). PMP is not an editor, but you can make three edits: rotation, resizing, and cropping. These are only marked as such and won't actually happen until you export the images.

In terms of output, Photo Mechanic allows you to save as a JPEG/TIFF/PSD, export to a range of templated formats (such as KMZ, XML, and HTML galleries), upload to a number of online services (such as FTP, Dropbox, Flickr, and Amazon S3), email, and burn to disc, among others. The dialogs all take a similar form (see below) specifying a connection, destination, along with image-processing and file-handling options.

Depending upon how rigorous you are, you may caption and keyword your images or rely on the automated face and location tagging. Camera Bits knows that these are essential processes for photojournalists and fully supports the IPTC metadata standard. Streamlining this task can make for a huge time-saver, and the key to the process is Photo Mechanic's variables; these are macros that allow you to automate the process of adding information to the IPTC data fields. For example {focallength} will automatically pull this in from the EXIF data. In a similar vein, code replacements allow you to rapidly insert standardized text as keywords and captions using a pre-defined file. These could be common terms, locations, or names.

Pulling these elements back together, Camera Bits gives a real-world example of a sports photographer who shoots a high volume of athletes at a meet; Photo Mechanic enables them to save each athlete to a different folder, and using code replacements at ingest, they are all tagged with each individual name and contact information along with the files automatically renamed.

This maps out the essential workflow for ingesting photos using Photo Mechanic, although there is considerably more depth to each element. For example, you can adjust capture dates and times — including relative adjustments — something that can be critical for multi-camera setups where individual camera timestamps have drifted. Every single dialog also has a snapshot button (lightning bolt) which allows you to save a copy of the dialog contents for future use. The level of attention to detail is clearly apparent and shows that every single element has been designed from the ground up based upon feedback from heavy lifting professionals — it's all about speed.

What I Liked

I've already said it, but it is worth repeating: Photo Mechanic is fast. Very fast. If you are used to the way Lightroom can stall at times, then it can take your breath away. By way of example, I pointed Photo Mechanic at my main image directory on my live editing PC which contains 400 GB across 37,000 files in 16,000 folders. After a short time to initially index all the photos across every directory, I was then able to seamlessly scroll through them all — no mean feat.

While performance is fast, the intention is to make your workflow fast by focusing upon: review, tag, cull, edit, keyword, ingest, and export. If your jobs use one or several standardized workflows — and particularly if you shoot large volumes of photos — then you will likely benefit from the refinement that Photo Mechanic can offer.

What Could Be Improved

In terms of a paradigm for the GUI (at least on Windows), Photo Mechanic feels a little dated. That doesn't impact its ability to get the job done, but it doesn't feel as "modern" as recent offerings from other vendors. Maybe it's because of this point, but Photo Mechanic also feels complicated. There's no doubt that there is a lot of flexibility and adaptability under the skin, but the import process is straightforward and easy to accomplish. Perhaps then it's just that the interface is a little busy, but don't let that detract from its laser focus upon speed.

In Summary

It's a philosophical detail, but Photo Mechanic uses a tabbed interface from which you can load one or multiple contact sheets. It reminded me how clunky Lightroom is with its requirement to restart in order to load a new catalog. Contact sheets aren't catalogs (although they have some similarity), but the ability to flick between different sheets is invaluable and again makes you wonder why Lightroom has stuck so ponderously to a single catalog interface rather than multiple tabs.

Reviewing Photo Mechanic's workflow is a reminder that Lightroom has got it mostly right by using the contact sheet paradigm and allowing some processing to take place at ingest. However, it just doesn't go far enough when working with large numbers of heavy files, opting for a one size fits all approach. Camera Bits has clearly realized this and the speed and flexibility of its ingest make it significantly faster at getting the right images to the right place as quickly as possible. Of course, part one of this review has only touched upon ingest, and Lightroom has a lot more to offer, not least its Digital Asset Management and global edits. More on this in part two.

Note: CameraBits provided a license of Photo Mechanic Plus for review. However, all of the views and opinions expressed in this article are my own.