Does Photo Mechanic have a light table feature where as the editor can create photos in a 1.2.3...and on and on sequence for creating a story with the photos?
15:54: The copyright symbol in Windows is alt 169 (not 196) on the numeric keypad. Most Windows laptops have a function key which assigns numbers to the main part of the keyboard which act as if they were on a numeric keypad.
Opps. Speaking and thinking, never minding chewing gum, seems to be a challenge for me. You are absolutely right. It's alt+169. Alt+196 appears to be a capital "A" with an umlaut over it.
Please help i have been watching your informative CZcams videos. In one of them you showed how to identify the variable code by clicking in the field in the ipct template. Please can you write this very useful tip down as I can't remember or re-find the video. I'm trying to find the relevant variables for an inhanced data ingest templates.
Recently (Oct/Nov 2017): Adobe once again changed how their apps accept images from other applications. What is the new workflow Photo Mechanic to Lightroom? Old way no longer working for me. Since Lightroom culling is now competive, Is Photo Mechanic worth it? Cheers, Bill Harris
As in the CMD/CTL+E command that sends a photo to Photoshop for editing working differently? Yeouch! That could be a major pain. I've got to grab preview versions and I'll put that on the list of things to check out. Thanks for the heads-up! As far as using Photo Mechanic and Lightroom together in a workflow, what I've always done is to use Photo Mechanic to apply metadata before importing the files into Lightroom. Lightroom then reads the metadata on import and all is good. You might want to do it that way because you just like the better metadata features in Photo Mechanic, or maybe because you need to work in a files and folders environment first, rather than overwhelming Lightroom's database (and/or your sanity) with thousands of outtakes. I can't imagine any changes to Lightroom that would break that workflow. If you have images that are already in Lightroom and you want to work on them in Photo Mechanic, say to do a bulk find and replace in the metadata, you need to make sure that you have embedded the metadata from Lightroom's database to the files (Metadata > Save Metadata to Files command in Lightroom) BEFORE you work on them in another program. Similarly, if you have edited a file that was already in LR's database in Photo Mechanic, you'll need to make sure you run the opposite command (Metadata > Read Metadata from File) once back in Lightroom. That will read the metadata from the file(s) back INTO Lightroom's DB. I can't imagine the embed and read commands going away from Lightroom, so I doubt there will be any problems. I will certainly look when I get the new versions of Lightroom, though. What I've said here applies to "regular" Lightroom, what is now known as Lightroom Classic. Adobe has stated flat out that the early versions of the new cloud-based Lightroom will not be feature complete. I shudder to think! That said, I have hopes for the cloud-based version. I think it might make Lightroom more useful as a "mini-DAM" in some small business environments. Time will tell. Is Photo Mechanic worth the spend? That still depends on your workflow and needs, but, yeah, probably. Photo Mechanic and Lightroom really address two different needs, albeit with some functional overlap. PM works in a files and folders world. That's the world where many professional photographers live. They have to handle massive quantities of data and then move on. Photo Mechanic dominates that space. Lightroom is database-driven. It's where your collection lives. Stuff in your Lightroom catalogs is probably stuff that you'll keep forever. Many people need to have it both ways. They may edit ten-thousand frame takes and they may also need to keep an archive of heros. If that's you, it's probably worth investing in both programs. If you need to keep in your database most every frame you shoot and your metadata needs are within Lightroom's capabilities, then Lightroom alone might do it for you. As a footnote, I can envision the new cloud-based Lightroom boosting the market for Photo Mechanic and similar programs. Cloud storage isn't free and upload bandwidth is for darn sure not unlimited. I can see people who move their collections to the cloud needing to winnow their shoots down before uploading them. And, if the cloud-based Lightroom's metadata features don't measure up, people will need to get all their metadata business taken care of in the workflow BEFORE Lightroom. There's a detailed Lightroom How-To on my blog.
Thank you Carl that's really helpful. I am currently using an old version of Canto Cumulus as a DAM. I have a library of 47k images categorised into a series of nested categories based on medical conditions. The images also have a large number of custom metadata fields relating to the patient information/condition. Within Cumulus I am able to export an XML file (600MB) containing all metadata for each image. Is there any way within Photo Mecanic to import those 47k images, then import the XML file, scanning over each image and applying those metadata fields within the Photo Mechanic library? Thank you for your consideration and attention
Hi. You're the second reader/viewer with issues migrating data from custom fields in just two weeks! In Photo Mechanic, you can import data from a tab-delimited file where the format is one line for each photo, starting with the filename and tab-data-tab-data. Basically, you load the tab-delimited file into Code Replacements and then make a template in the Template Editor (formerly Stationary Pad) with entries in various fields that point back to the Code Replacements feature. But you have to somehow get your data file into that format. And that's the tricky part. This thread on the Photo Mechanic forums might help forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=6962.0 along with the documentation for code replacements. There may well be an easier way with ExifTool. There are wonderfully helpful people in both the Photo Mechanic and ExifTool forums. Good luck.
Thanks, Carl, this was very helpful. I am looking at PM as a possible way to enter IPTC metadata on my images-I'm primarily a landscape photographer, but I also do some documentation work. I'm very happy with the keywording capabilities of LR, but adding IPTC data is cumbersome and I'd like to find a way to expedite this process, possibly with PM. I'm going to check out some of your other videos and see it they can provide additional information. Thanks again.
Many of my viewers use Photo Mechanic in front of, or behind, Lightroom. Not to toot my own horn, but I think that you're on the right track. Like many really powerful programs, Photo Mechanic has a bit of learning curve if you want to get the most from it. Watching some videos will give an idea of what it can do ahead of the trial period. Photo Mechanic's own documentation is excellent, but it helps a lot to know in advance what to expect. If you like Lightroom's keywording functionality, I have to imagine you'll love Photo Mechanic's. There's way more horsepower there. In my keywording series, I talk about roundtrip workflows between the two programs. Personally, I hate keywording, so I pretty much do all of it in Photo Mechanic, 'cause it's faster and Photo Mechanic writes cleaner keywords. But both programs are standards compliant, and that's what really counts. Lightroom has pretty good template capabilities for your standing metadata. (Remember that Google now supports three copyright-related fields, so they deserve special care.) That said, if you have to do a lot of it, laying down templated metadata and adding captions is quicker and more powerful in Photo Mechanic. Good luck!
Excellent video. My question is how do you search the metadata. I know the normal search dialog where I can search Keywords, for example. But I want to search for Camera Model, for instance, or photos that were taken with a certain lens. Is there a way to do this? I've search everywhere and don't really see this addressed. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge of Photo Mechanic!
Hi Duane, Photo Mechanic has two different search tools. "Find" acts only on the open contact sheet. You can search across all of it or just selected items. Find can only search against IPTC fields. "Search", on the other hand, can search across your whole machine and it can search against an assortment of IPTC and Exif fields, including Exif fields of the sort you mention. BUT there's a catch. Search is only a front end to Spotlight, the Mac OS indexing function. The Windows indexer doesn't index photo metadata, so on Windows, that's a no-go. I don't have a Windows copy at the moment, but when last I did have one, I don't think Search was implemented at all. Photo Mechanic does have variables for most Exif fields. If this was a thing that you regularly needed to accommodate, you could simply use variables to make a Stationery Pad preset to copy certain Exif fields into the Keywords field as keywords. Then, you would be able to always find images by those criteria, either with Photo Mechanic's search function or with the sort of search engine that would be found in a DAM. The downside would be that you would need to apply that preset and save your "Exif-ish" keywords to the images ahead of time. If you're a Windows user, of the programs I cover, Lightroom and ON1 Photo RAW might be candidates for doing that sort of task. Both can search against Exif data. Since both are RAW converter/editors, which is probably where you would be working anyway if you were struck with a need to filter by Exif data, they might be just the ticket. Many Photo Mechanic users use one of those sorts of products downstream in their workflow anyway.
Carl, Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I use PM in front of LR Classic so I think I will use the filter with Metadata features in LR since they are really well implemented, e.g. filtering by camera model. Thank you again for your help! Duane
Yes indeed. You're right. Sadly, CZcams doesn't allow you to edit an existing video. If they did, I'd put up an "oops matte" right there. I did add a correction to the description. Hopefully, that will help.
Outstanding work, thanks. A pleasure to find a gentleman who knows, uses and can describe clearly and succinctly process and context! Subscribed!
Thank you for the walk though this was really helpful
Sincere thanks Carl Excellent work
Does Photo Mechanic have a light table feature where as the editor can create photos in a 1.2.3...and on and on sequence for creating a story with the photos?
15:54: The copyright symbol in Windows is alt 169 (not 196) on the numeric keypad. Most Windows laptops have a function key which assigns numbers to the main part of the keyboard which act as if they were on a numeric keypad.
Opps. Speaking and thinking, never minding chewing gum, seems to be a challenge for me. You are absolutely right. It's alt+169. Alt+196 appears to be a capital "A" with an umlaut over it.
Please help i have been watching your informative CZcams videos. In one of them you showed how to identify the variable code by clicking in the field in the ipct template. Please can you write this very useful tip down as I can't remember or re-find the video. I'm trying to find the relevant variables for an inhanced data ingest templates.
Wonderful video Carl, Look forward to key word video !
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thank you Carl !
Hi Angel! Great to see you here. I'll DM you my email address.....
Recently (Oct/Nov 2017):
Adobe once again changed how their apps accept images from other applications.
What is the new workflow Photo Mechanic to Lightroom?
Old way no longer working for me.
Since Lightroom culling is now competive, Is Photo Mechanic worth it?
Cheers, Bill Harris
As in the CMD/CTL+E command that sends a photo to Photoshop for editing working differently? Yeouch! That could be a major pain. I've got to grab preview versions and I'll put that on the list of things to check out. Thanks for the heads-up!
As far as using Photo Mechanic and Lightroom together in a workflow, what I've always done is to use Photo Mechanic to apply metadata before importing the files into Lightroom. Lightroom then reads the metadata on import and all is good. You might want to do it that way because you just like the better metadata features in Photo Mechanic, or maybe because you need to work in a files and folders environment first, rather than overwhelming Lightroom's database (and/or your sanity) with thousands of outtakes. I can't imagine any changes to Lightroom that would break that workflow.
If you have images that are already in Lightroom and you want to work on them in Photo Mechanic, say to do a bulk find and replace in the metadata, you need to make sure that you have embedded the metadata from Lightroom's database to the files (Metadata > Save Metadata to Files command in Lightroom) BEFORE you work on them in another program.
Similarly, if you have edited a file that was already in LR's database in Photo Mechanic, you'll need to make sure you run the opposite command (Metadata > Read Metadata from File) once back in Lightroom. That will read the metadata from the file(s) back INTO Lightroom's DB. I can't imagine the embed and read commands going away from Lightroom, so I doubt there will be any problems. I will certainly look when I get the new versions of Lightroom, though.
What I've said here applies to "regular" Lightroom, what is now known as Lightroom Classic. Adobe has stated flat out that the early versions of the new cloud-based Lightroom will not be feature complete. I shudder to think! That said, I have hopes for the cloud-based version. I think it might make Lightroom more useful as a "mini-DAM" in some small business environments. Time will tell.
Is Photo Mechanic worth the spend? That still depends on your workflow and needs, but, yeah, probably. Photo Mechanic and Lightroom really address two different needs, albeit with some functional overlap. PM works in a files and folders world. That's the world where many professional photographers live. They have to handle massive quantities of data and then move on. Photo Mechanic dominates that space. Lightroom is database-driven. It's where your collection lives. Stuff in your Lightroom catalogs is probably stuff that you'll keep forever.
Many people need to have it both ways. They may edit ten-thousand frame takes and they may also need to keep an archive of heros. If that's you, it's probably worth investing in both programs. If you need to keep in your database most every frame you shoot and your metadata needs are within Lightroom's capabilities, then Lightroom alone might do it for you.
As a footnote, I can envision the new cloud-based Lightroom boosting the market for Photo Mechanic and similar programs. Cloud storage isn't free and upload bandwidth is for darn sure not unlimited. I can see people who move their collections to the cloud needing to winnow their shoots down before uploading them. And, if the cloud-based Lightroom's metadata features don't measure up, people will need to get all their metadata business taken care of in the workflow BEFORE Lightroom.
There's a detailed Lightroom How-To on my blog.
Thank you Carl that's really helpful.
I am currently using an old version of Canto Cumulus as a DAM. I have a library of 47k images categorised into a series of nested categories based on medical conditions. The images also have a large number of custom metadata fields relating to the patient information/condition.
Within Cumulus I am able to export an XML file (600MB) containing all metadata for each image. Is there any way within Photo Mecanic to import those 47k images, then import the XML file, scanning over each image and applying those metadata fields within the Photo Mechanic library?
Thank you for your consideration and attention
Hi. You're the second reader/viewer with issues migrating data from custom fields in just two weeks! In Photo Mechanic, you can import data from a tab-delimited file where the format is one line for each photo, starting with the filename and tab-data-tab-data. Basically, you load the tab-delimited file into Code Replacements and then make a template in the Template Editor (formerly Stationary Pad) with entries in various fields that point back to the Code Replacements feature.
But you have to somehow get your data file into that format. And that's the tricky part.
This thread on the Photo Mechanic forums might help forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=6962.0 along with the documentation for code replacements.
There may well be an easier way with ExifTool. There are wonderfully helpful people in both the Photo Mechanic and ExifTool forums.
Good luck.
@@carlseibert9015 Thank you so much for your fulsome reply, Carl. Very much appreciated
Thanks, Carl, this was very helpful. I am looking at PM as a possible way to enter IPTC metadata on my images-I'm primarily a landscape photographer, but I also do some documentation work. I'm very happy with the keywording capabilities of LR, but adding IPTC data is cumbersome and I'd like to find a way to expedite this process, possibly with PM. I'm going to check out some of your other videos and see it they can provide additional information. Thanks again.
Many of my viewers use Photo Mechanic in front of, or behind, Lightroom. Not to toot my own horn, but I think that you're on the right track. Like many really powerful programs, Photo Mechanic has a bit of learning curve if you want to get the most from it. Watching some videos will give an idea of what it can do ahead of the trial period. Photo Mechanic's own documentation is excellent, but it helps a lot to know in advance what to expect.
If you like Lightroom's keywording functionality, I have to imagine you'll love Photo Mechanic's. There's way more horsepower there. In my keywording series, I talk about roundtrip workflows between the two programs. Personally, I hate keywording, so I pretty much do all of it in Photo Mechanic, 'cause it's faster and Photo Mechanic writes cleaner keywords. But both programs are standards compliant, and that's what really counts.
Lightroom has pretty good template capabilities for your standing metadata. (Remember that Google now supports three copyright-related fields, so they deserve special care.) That said, if you have to do a lot of it, laying down templated metadata and adding captions is quicker and more powerful in Photo Mechanic.
Good luck!
Excellent video. My question is how do you search the metadata. I know the normal search dialog where I can search Keywords, for example. But I want to search for Camera Model, for instance, or photos that were taken with a certain lens. Is there a way to do this? I've search everywhere and don't really see this addressed. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge of Photo Mechanic!
Hi Duane,
Photo Mechanic has two different search tools. "Find" acts only on the open contact sheet. You can search across all of it or just selected items. Find can only search against IPTC fields.
"Search", on the other hand, can search across your whole machine and it can search against an assortment of IPTC and Exif fields, including Exif fields of the sort you mention. BUT there's a catch. Search is only a front end to Spotlight, the Mac OS indexing function. The Windows indexer doesn't index photo metadata, so on Windows, that's a no-go. I don't have a Windows copy at the moment, but when last I did have one, I don't think Search was implemented at all.
Photo Mechanic does have variables for most Exif fields. If this was a thing that you regularly needed to accommodate, you could simply use variables to make a Stationery Pad preset to copy certain Exif fields into the Keywords field as keywords. Then, you would be able to always find images by those criteria, either with Photo Mechanic's search function or with the sort of search engine that would be found in a DAM. The downside would be that you would need to apply that preset and save your "Exif-ish" keywords to the images ahead of time.
If you're a Windows user, of the programs I cover, Lightroom and ON1 Photo RAW might be candidates for doing that sort of task. Both can search against Exif data. Since both are RAW converter/editors, which is probably where you would be working anyway if you were struck with a need to filter by Exif data, they might be just the ticket. Many Photo Mechanic users use one of those sorts of products downstream in their workflow anyway.
Carl, Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I use PM in front of LR Classic so I think I will use the filter with Metadata features in LR since they are really well implemented, e.g. filtering by camera model. Thank you again for your help!
Duane
Around the 16 minute mark, you incorrectly said numerical order the © symbol in a windows machine with the wrong sequence. It is NOT ALT + 0-1-9-6. It IS ALT + 0-1-6-9 One needs to hold down the ALT key while typing the numbers from the keypad on the right side of the keyboard. Otherwise a good and useful video. Thx
Yes indeed. You're right. Sadly, CZcams doesn't allow you to edit an existing video. If they did, I'd put up an "oops matte" right there. I did add a correction to the description. Hopefully, that will help.