![]() But they suffer from serious limitations or they’re not all that reliable, or the interface is silly. If you come from an environment that includes a “real” photo-oriented DAM, even the best of these desktop alternatives feel like toys. ![]() Various inexpensive “browser” programs offer collection management, as do most “all-in-one” photographers’ programs like ON1 Photo RAW, Lightroom Classic, and Capture One. Camera manufacturers give away photo management/browser programs. When you buy a computer, it comes with a truly awful “Photos” program of some sort. There are dozens of programs out there that, to a greater or lesser extent, help manage a photo collection. ![]() Photo Mechanic Plus is certainly not the first entrant in this space. On the other hand, if you’re short on time and you’re just looking for a review, read as far as you want, then you can skip to the last two words of the review, which are “highly recommended”. Or maybe you’ll find some archiving background interesting. If you downloaded a trial of PM+ you might want to learn a bit about how to use it. Basic asset management How-To and Photo Mechanic-specific How-To. Since I was going to be using it, I wanted it to be the best. I could tell after 10 minutes with a fairly early beta that this thing was going to seriously rock and I got involved for purely selfish reasons. And my copy of Photo Mechanic Plus is provided by Camera Bits.ĭisclaimer to the disclaimer: I didn’t get involved with this product because Camera Bits sought me out or because I wanted to go into software reviewing. I did help, in some small way, the developers fine-tune the product. And it’s obvious already that this post is one. (Ouch!) It’s the best – by far – desktop asset management tool for photographers that I have yet encountered. Leaving semantics aside, I’ve worked with DAM systems for a couple of decades and I can tell you that this tool, whatever we decide to call it – wait for it – is a DAM fine tool. Photo Mechanic doesn’t seem to be using The DAM Word in its marketing for the new product. “ Search functionality is the heart of any DAM system.” We have perfectly fine existing websites to deal with displaying and sharing our work, thank you very much. After all, our systems don’t do office documents. There is some debate about whether or not we should even call photographers’ archive management systems “DAMs” at all. And who has that kind of money? A DAM by any other name? In the broadest sense, most of us could force a three-thousand-dollar a month DAM to work. (Most DAMs don’t even have “real” folders at all.) Photo Mechanic Plus looks like Photo Mechanic because it IS Photo Mechanic with catalog/archive capability added. We need to find our way around folders, to and from the computer’s “real” file system. Stuff like retrieving images to edit, filtering search returns according to ratings and flags, uploading to our own kinds of “external partners”, editing metadata at scale, and handling output renditions in a granular way. We need to do photographer stuff that’s sometimes a bit different from general-purpose DAM stuff. Photographers have to deal with relatively vast numbers of assets – pictures – many of which don’t have metadata, or don’t have unique metadata. Photographers have very different digital asset management needs than the usual customers of DAM systems, like marketing departments, for example. Photo Mechanic Plus combines a full-featured instance of Photo Mechanic 6 with new photo cataloging capabilities. The new release combines a photo asset management system with Photo Mechanic 6Ĭamera Bits has released Photo Mechanic Plus, the company’s new digital asset management product for photographers. Superb search headlines the new Photo Mechanic Plus. The search function is the heart of a photo cataloging or DAM or whatever we are calling it system.
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