It’s an increasingly crowded photo browser landscape: Photo Mechanic these days competes against programs such as FotoStation Classic and FotoTrafiX, both of which are aimed at the working digital photographer. Plus, Photoshop’s File Browser has gotten better over time and is a good launching pad for batch processing, the low cost of ACDSee 7 for Windows make it an interesting choice for pros who need quick preview speed and little else while the duo of BreezeBrowser Pro and Downloader Pro from Breeze Systems have a depth of functionality that make them worth a look (the last two applications are Windows-only).

In short, there are a lot of ways to browse photos these days, and we haven’t even mentioned good image catalogers such as Extensis Portfolio and iView MediaPro that are designed to be pseudo-browsers too.

Photo Mechanic doesn’t do everything that all the other browsing applications put together do. But with v4.3, it not only continues to do what it does as well or better than anything else we’ve tried, its expanding feature set means it now does an awful lot.

Version 4.3 for Mac (OS X 10.2 and later) and Windows 2000/XP, when released later this week, will be a free update for licensed Photo Mechanic users that have purchased the program in the last year. A fully-functional trial demo will be posted at the same time. The program is US$150 direct from Camera Bits (and a similar price at pro photo retailers that carry Lexar products).

Website : RAW+JPEG handling get major boost in upcoming Photo Mechanic 4.3