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Olympus 14 Megapixels SP-800UZ 30x SuperZoom Review by PR With Rating 7.5/10


Camera Bits Photo Mechanic Review by PhotographyBLOG With Rating 4/5

2010-08-03 03:55 | Source
Camera Bits's Photo Mechanic is a powerful photo importing, browsing, captioning and FTP transfer application.  Photo Mechanic displays your thumbnails in a familiar contact sheet display window. It helps you find the best photo amongst several similar shots in a preview display that lets you flip through a group of selected photos at high resolution.

Photo Mechanic's super fast browsing enables you to quickly compare multiple images and select the best ones from a sequence. Its batch processing, full support for image variables, IPTC and Exif metadata, make it the perfect tool for any digital photographer. The latest update version 4.6.5 is a free for licensed users who purchased the software on or after February 2009. A new license of the software is priced at $150. You can try out the software for 20-days here. The list of new features in version 4.6.5 are below:

  • (Mac) Fixed a problem with creating the disk cache folder if it doesn't already exist.
  • (Mac) Fixed a crashing problem in the slide show on mid-2010 MacBook Pro models when Automatic Graphics Switching is enabled. The source of the bug was in the open source SDL code.
  • Added an option in Live Ingest to wait no longer than X seconds for JPEGs that don't appear to be complete. This prevents a Live Ingest process from stalling on a dropped JPEG transmission. However, Live Ingest will not wait this long for all JPEGs because the moment they are complete they are processed.
  • Added support for RAW "SRW" files from the Samsung NX10.
  • (Mac) Photoshop CS5 (bundle) droplets are now correctly recognized.
  • Made watermarking able to have scaling options for any of the nine locations, as long as there is only one location checked.
  • (Mac) Added more options for how Autocompletion is initiated, and provided a popup menu of choices (as per Mac OS X standard).
  • (Mac) Spell checker now works on Mac OS X 10.6 thanks to a work-around for a longstanding Mac OS X 10.6 bug.
  • Slideshow no longer occasionally skips a fade transition when applying crops.
  • Changed the evaluation of variables when being used as part of a folder path (e.g. Ingest folder path field) to prevent certain variables such as {date} from creating unwanted nested folders such as year/month/day. This essentially reverts to 4.6.3 behavior in certain circumstances (changing illegal folder name characters to '-') while still allowing nested folders to be created when variables are used in code replacements. When a variable is evaluated before it is used as a code lookup, and when being used to create a path, any illegal folder name characters are now converted to dashes.
  • Fixed additional issues when handling images (e.g. TIFF or PSD) with file sizes greater than 2GB but less than 4GB. Also, files larger than 4 GB are now "disabled" by making the file a "proxy" if this feature is enabled (otherwise the file is not visible).
  • Added {artist} (or {arti}) variable for TIFF Artist field that is set by some cameras. If you are using a camera that writes the TIFF Artist field, then you can put this variable in your IPTC Stationery Pad for the "Photographer" field to transfer this setting to IPTC/XMP during ingest, for example.
  • Added {tiffcopyright} (or {tifc}) variable for the TIFF copyright field that is set by some cameras. As above, you can put this variable in the IPTC Stationery Pad for the "Copyright" field to transfer this setting.
  • Reverting TIFF-based RAW files now removes any end-of-file preferences when the File settings call for RAW files to be unmodified and the appended EOF prefs are the only difference compared to the original RAW file. However, you must check the "Backup IPTC/XMP to XMP sidecar files" option in the Revert dialog.
  • The Zenfolio uploader template now automatically selects new galleries created at the root level.
  • The Save As dialog is now hidden during the save process.
  • Structured Keywords no longer crashes when searching for an exact match for the word 'root'.
  • (Mac) Cropping RAW images with a constrained crop no longer has issues when the crop is dragged to the top of the image.

Here is the review summary by PhotographyBLOG, giving the software a rating of 4 out of 5:

"Photo Mechanic isn't for everyone. At $150 it's expensive if you're just looking for an image browser and importer. But, if you shoot hundreds of images at a time, or you work with other photographers and a standard workflow is important, Photo Mechanic can quickly pay for itself. Personally, I prefer the ingesting process and flexibility over that found in Lightroom, which is my main workflow application. The ability to add IPTC stationary to images, assign variables, and to create automatic backups of my files is a welcome feature and reduces the chance that I'll forget to do this on my own.

It's not the most intuitive program to learn completely. While you can install and start using immediately, to really learn the features and to take full advantage of the program you'll need to spend some time with the documentation. Still, Photo Mechanic is far and away the fastest way to ingest and browse images that I've come across. When working with large numbers of images from a shoot, this is the first application I turn to for initial workflow."


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