Upgrade brings speed, functionality improvements; biggest news is upcoming Photo Mechanic DAM

Camera Bits has released version 6 of Photo Mechanic. Version 5 was released way back in 2012. According to Camera Bits’ Director of Marketing Mick Orlosky, there have been 43 updates to Photo Mechanic 5 during its six-plus-year run. Many of those updates introduced new or refined functionality.  Clearly, Camera Bits business model isn’t pestering their users for upgrade fees every time they turn around.

Camera Bits has lowered the price of a full Photo Mechanic license by $11, to (USD) $139. The upgrade fee drops by a buck, to (USD) $89.

New stuff

I demonstrate most of the new features in the video.

 

So, what’s new in this long-awaited new version of Photo Mechanic? I’ll go over some of the high points here.

Speed

The headline item is that Photo Mechanic is now a 64-bit application. This is a complete rewrite of the program.  It’s now compatible with new, modern operating systems. Apple threatened to orphan 32 applications in their just-released OS. Now, it’s to be the next one, in a year or so. But still.

The downside is that if you’re still running an ancient 32-bit copy of Windows XP, you’ll either have to upgrade the old OS or stay on Photo Mechanic 5.

In any case, the jump to 64 bits, and improvements in how the program handles cache bring with them a significant jump in speed. Camera Bits claims a two to three times increase. Orlosky said the most noticeable improvement is in the generation of thumbnails. I conducted a highly unscientific test on a directory tree with a couple thousand images in it. Photo Mechanic 5 took 5 minutes and 45 seconds to complete my test and Photo Mechanic 6 blasted through the folders in a  minute and 57 seconds. That’s a tad under a three-times faster. So. As claimed.

Of course, Photo Mechanic has always been fast. Generally, it reacts to commands instantly. It’s clever enough that it draws thumbnails first where ever you scroll the contact sheet. So, for most users, the speed increase won’t be glaringly obvious. But after using version 6 for a few weeks now, I can attest that it does feel snappier.

Metadata changes

Metadata geeks – the readers of this blog included – will be interested to learn that version 6 simplifies and automates the matter of read order between the IIM and XMP data blocks.

No longer must we specify in the preferences whether we want to prefer one or the other. Photo Mechanic will now always look for the XMP version of a field first. If there’s a value there, it will read it. If not, it will fall back to the IIM. The big news here is that it now evaluates each field individually! This aligns Photo Mechanic’s behavior with most newly-developed applications and with the current behavior of Adobe products.

Photo Mechanic no longer askes whether to read from the XMP sidecar or embedded metadata in the case of RAW files that have both. In such a case, Photo Mechanic now evaluates both instances of the metadata and goes with the newest. Most readers of this blog will tread close enough to best practices that they – hopefully – will rarely encounter RAW files with embedded metadata. But, if you do, it’s worth bearing in mind how Photo Mechanic now handles them.

(Note that Adobe DNG files are intended to carry embedded metadata. That’s part of the point of them. For other TIFF based RAWS, many applications – Photo Mechanic included – will attempt to write into such files if you insist on it. But we should avoid doing that.)

Fun functionality

Photo Mechanic 6 adds reverse geocoding to its impressive portfolio of GPS features. Now you can automatically, or on command, resolve GPS coordinates embedded in the Exif data to fill in your IPTC location fields – City, State or Province, and Country. In some cases, I’ve seen it resolve down to the name of a business or landmark, like my favorite bar.

I have seen occasions when reverse geocoding fails to fill the City field. Photo Mechanic uses the open source Open Street Map database. Open Street Map doesn’t understand the idea of “city” the same way that most photographers (and the IPTC) do. The correct city information is there in OSM, but surfacing it isn’t as straight forward as one would hope. Photo Mechanic lead developer Kirk Baker is on the case. We can expect a fix soon.

Some human supervision is a good idea here, anyway. Where I live in the US, some locations aren’t in incorporated municipalities. Those will always be tricky. Different organizations and audiences will have different needs that can only be addressed by human judgment. For a local or regional audience, you might want to treat City of Industry, California as the IPTC “City”. For an international audience, it would more likely be “Los Angeles”.

Reverse geocoding fills in your location fields, but it doesn’t copy your GPS coordinates from the Exif to the IPTC. If you want your actual coordinates exposed, just use variables to print it out in the field of your choice. You’ll probably make a string something like this: Latitude: {latitude} Longitude: {longitude}  which will yield something like this: Latitude: N26°06.149′ Longitude: W80°07.825′    (the lat/lon of… yes… my favorite bar)

UPDATE:  As of about a minute before I posted this, I am told, and can confirm, that Reverse Geocode is working fine in the most current beta of Photo Mechanic Plus. That means that the fix should very soon appear in Photo Mechanic.  Most likely, by the time you read this, the city field will be filling itself in just fine. (On images that have Exif GPS coordinates, of course.)  This kind of responsiveness is yet more evidence why this application is worth 89 bucks every half-decade or so.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  As of the next day, a new build of Photo Mechanic is out and, yes indeed, Reverse Geocode is filling the city field in all of my problem test files.

Better crop tool

The crop tool sees improvements including a crop preview mode, fine grid lines in rotate, and shift-drag to constrain proportions.

One click zoom

In Preview, you can now simply click anywhere in the image to zoom in, centered on the cursor location. (No need to hold CTL/CMD). You can enable this in the preferences. For me, this is big. It’s the feature that put 89 bucks on my credit card.

Snapshot

The Snapshot menu now includes an option to “Manage Snapshots”, which opens the appropriate Snapshots folder in the OS file manager.  This reduces the need to watch my videos to learn how to deal with .SNAP files. I guess it’s a good thing. I’m not sure how I really feel about that.

Find and Find and Replace

Find, er, finds improvements including the ability to use variables in Replace and the possibility to use regular expressions. Not that I’m any good at regular expressions, nor do I think it’s a common skill amongst photographers. But those who have the skill, or a Google search at hand to fake it, can now do some pretty amazing stuff in Find.

Uploaders

There are several new and improved uploaders in V6, including new ones for Box.com and Dropbox, as well as Amazon S3. Many companies nowadays use cloud services like Box and Dropbox as part of their everyday workflow, so the new uploaders could be an every-assignment thing for some people. I’m not in that group, but I still upload photos to those services at least a few times a week, so I’m very much down with this.

There is an improved FTP dialog that allows you to navigate through directories on the FTP server, too. I have found it doesn’t work on all FTP servers, but if it works on yours, it could be a lifesaver. Not to worry, the old FTP dialog that you’ve used every day for the last couple of decades is still included, doing business at the same old spot.

Slide show

The slide show is improved with transitions, better high definition monitor support, and better text capabilities, among other things. I don’t really use it, but I know photographers who use Slide Show ten times a day. This could be the $89 feature for some folks.

Do flips

In addition to its existing rotation capabilities, Photo Mechanic can now mirror, or flip photos. OK. In the ReadMe, Camera Bits tells its core customers about this feature exactly what their bosses will say. It’s not for journalists! But for somebody…

Who’s not here?

So those are some of the new features. Did they kill off any old ones that some users might mourn?

Well, Mac users of Photo Mechanic used to have a search function that used the Mac OS’s Spotlight index to search across the user’s whole computer.

Apparently, more users didn’t understand the function’s limitations, or why it wasn’s available in the Windows version (the Windows equivalent to Spotlight doesn’t index metadata) and complained about it, than made use of it. Personally, I used it fairly often. But the feature is gone regardless.

Devoted users of Search can probably use the free version of NeoFinder to accomplish the tasks that Search handled.

DAM big news!

But the good news is that Camera Bits is working on a digital asset management-enabled version of Photo Mechanic that will be a game changer/paradigm shift/insert-your-own-hyperbolic-cliche-here.

As I write this, in May 2019, Photo Mechanic Plus is in early public beta. It’s not feature complete yet and I won’t comment on functionality that might or might not be in the release version. But I can say that, as it looks today, it will decouple image browsing, selection, metadata editing, and DAM functionality from RAW conversion and pixel editing for photographers who care to go that way. That could be absolutely enormous for many photographers!

Today, the only viable options for DAM for photographers are baked into non-destructive RAW programs like Lightroom, ON1 Photo RAW, and CaptureOne. That is not exactly a marriage made in heaven. The best of those programs impose all sorts of penalties on data portability and safety, search, and metadata capabilities. There aren’t many stand-alone desktop DAMs out there today and none that impress me much.

That’s about to change. Unless something goes drastically wrong, we are soon to have a professional-level desktop DAM, with nearly perfect data portability, right inside our favorite image browser.

Pricing for Photo Mechanic Plus has not been announced.

 

There’s more to the Photo Mechanic version 6 upgrade than I’ve covered here. And the biggest news is almost certainly the soon-to-come Photo Mechanic DAM. How is PM6 working out for you? Jump in the comments and let us know.