Developer(s) Camera Bits, Inc Type image browser | Operating system Website www.camerabits.com | |
Stable release 5.0 / November 11, 2013; 3 years ago (2013-11-11) | ||
Photo Mechanic is a front-end photo ingesting, tagging, and browsing tool by Portland, Oregon-based company Camera Bits.
Contents
Photo Mechanic supports the initial capture of photos from the camera, previewing and making selections, and tagging each photo with various types of IPTC metadata such as captions, keywords, and copyright notices.
The application retails at approximately USD $150. It is targeted for the professional photographer market, particularly photojournalism and stock photography. It is widely used in that field, with popular features including very fast image previews, and efficient workflows for quickly adding IPTC metadata.
While Photo Mechanic has basic support for simple image edits, such as crops, it is meant to be used in concert with a dedicated photo editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In contrast to competing products such as iView Media Pro, Adobe Bridge, or Extensis Portfolio, Photo Mechanic does not include photo cataloging or asset management features.
Browsing
Photo Mechanic supports fast photo browsing and full color management.
Categorizing
Photo Mechanic lets the photographer apply a "tag", "color class", or "star rating" to each photo with a single keystroke. This can be used later to filter photos by quality or classification.
Metadata tagging
Photo Mechanic uses the concept of "IPTC Stationery." The user sets up templates called "stationery" with the tags common to a group of photos, and can then quickly apply them to any arbitrary set of photos. Photo Mechanic can write IPTC metadata to many file formats, including proprietary formats such as Canon CR2 or Nikon NEF. Other keywording solutions typically cannot write keywords directly to the RAW file, but instead create a "sidecar" XMP file. Photo Mechanic actually embeds the keywords in the RAW file itself. If preferred, Photo Mechanic can also create and maintain sidecar files in addition to embedding IPTC and XMP into photos.