Photo Organizing Software Suggestions

[john_macpherson]

<p>I'll second, or third, or fourth or whatever....Photo Mechanic - it's been step one for me for years, followed by iView MP and now Lightroom.</p>

<p>PM is a solid and robust piece of software that can only be described as elegant. Its unbelievably fast and continually amazes me at the speed with which it allows you to edit.</p>

<p>You wont regret the admission price, and the owner Bob (Russell) is very helpful if you have a problem and will happily assist you with any hiccups.</p>

[tom_mann1]

<p>Brian, just to be sure you realize, Photo Mechanic is designed to be the absolute best-in-class at the time consuming step of ingesting (ie, initial viewing, culling, adding keywords, captions and other metadata, file renaming and renumbering, etc.) images, and lives up to this claim, but it does not have ANY real image searching and retrieval abilities. That is where many of the other programs mentioned come in. Photo Mechanic must be used in concert with one or more of these other programs, even if it is something as simple as Picasa.</p>

<p>Once you have more than a few thousand images, the ability to retrieve images based on keywords, captions, date ranges, etc. (ie, a good image retrieval system) is utterly essential. You can't rely on something like your file and folder naming convention.</p>

<p>Put differently, PM does exactly what is stated on the home page of Camera Bits. It performs these functions as close to perfectly as anyone could image, but it doesn't do more than that.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - There are numerous discussions / reviews of PM on the web, e.g., http://www.opensourcephoto.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=50400 . You might find them interesting.</p>

[lew_dreisinger2]

<p>Tom, thanks for this valuable information. I am jumping into this thread after a lot of searching elsewhere. It is, as you say, the "(ie, initial viewing, culling, adding keywords, captions and other metadata, file renaming and renumbering, etc.)" that is the daunting task and I'm trying to deal with before it becomes unmanageable. <br>

Two followups,<br>

Can you explain how the second program compliments Photo Mechanic? Do they provide the missing database index/retrieval function or something else?<br>

I am looking for a standard and many previous comments mention mixed formats. Is there any reason not to convert all raw files to DNG? I would prefer to have a single format with all the pieces available as needed. I've read a few pros and cons and my workflow is already Adobe centric. Thank you for any comments on this. I'll be going ahead with Photo Mechanic now.</p>

<p>Lew Dreisinger</p>