Photo Mechanic Review (2024)

Plenty of photo apps let you view, import, and organize photos from your digital media, including the mindshare-leading workflow program Adobe Lightroom. But seasoned pro photographers have long sworn by Photo Mechanic as the fastest importer and previewer, as well as the most capable tool for organizing thousands of shots. But is it worth getting as an additional program when you need other software to do actual editing?

Photo Mechanic doesn't let you edit photos, nor is it meant for processing raw camera files. It does, however, let you import, organize, and rate your images, and then export them to another app for editing, upload them to an online service, or print them. Versions of the software for both macOS and Windows are available, and capabilities are nearly identical in both.

How Much Does Photo Mechanic Cost?

Photo Mechanic carries a one-time purchase price of $139. Upgrading from an earlier version costs $89. The premium version, Photo Mechanic Plus ($229 or $90 to upgrade), adds an image database with multiple catalog capability.

It's hard to draw comparisons with competing software, since most of the competitors do a lot more than let you view, import, and organize photos. The closest thing is Corel AfterShot Pro, which goes for $79.99 and includes more photo editing options and raw camera file correction profiles. Adobe Lightroom Classic, which does an excellent job of importing and organizing, will lock you into a $9.99-per-month subscription for as long as you wan to use the program.

Getting Started With Photo Mechanic

Photo Mechanic requires Windows 8 or later or macOS 10.11 or later. During installation, a dialog asks whether you want to download GStreamer, which is needed if you want to view videos in Photo Mechanic. Once you install GStreamer, you continue with the main installation by entering your serial number and giving permission to the app to contact Camera Bit's servers. If you're installing the trial, you have to install yet another applet.

When you first run the application, you see its empty interface along with a File Explorer window where you choose a folder to open.

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The window quickly populates with your shots with what Camera Bits calls the Contact Sheet. Each folder you open gets a new tab at the top of the window.

Photo Mechanic's Interface

Photo Mechanic's interface uses light colored window borders, which most photo software has moved away from in favor of a dark gray that doesn't distract from the images. In general, the interface seems to hail from the Windows Vista days, with 3D Aero styling. Despite the outdated design touches, the interface is still functional, with clear on-hover buttons on each thumbnail for rotating, viewing info, and opening in full view.

You can enlarge the Contact Sheet view in Photo Mechanic with a slider at the top of the window, and you can sort images by capture time, modified time, filename, star rating, and other criteria. Missing are simple pick and reject buttons offered by other software, though you can check a tag box or press T or + to tag an image, which is this app's equivalent to what other apps call a pick. Once you land on a photo you want to edit, you can tap the E key to open it in your default photo editing application for that file type.

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In the Contact Sheet view, you can star-rate each image in its thumbnail or right-click to set a color tag as well as perform other metadata functions.

Opening a photo puts it into a image viewer interface, which is equally clear.

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Here you can zoom by holding the Shift key and spinning the mouse wheel or using a slider in the right-side panel. The reason for the Shift key is that the more significant use of the mouse wheel is to quickly move back and forth through images, for which a filmstrip view appears across the bottom. You also see a histogram, a useful tool for determining whether you got the lighting right in a shot. Radio buttons display blown highlights and lost shadow detail, but I'm not sure why you can't show both at once with different color overlays as you can in Lightroom Classic.

Metadata

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One of Photo Mechanic's strengths is its detailed metadata entry capabilities. Professional photographers will appreciate the thorough IPTC entry boxes for model, copyright, location, and project details. You can create metadata templates to add to multiple photos later. Keyword entry is similarly full featured, with preset structured keyword hierarchy support for things as detailed as bird species.

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You can also use the Reverse GPS function to add place name metatags to your photos. Regrettably, it doesn't mean you can view a map showing where all your pictures were shot, as you can in Lightroom Classic and other software.

Photo Mechanic even has Hot Codes that let you quickly insert metadata you entered into a file, and they can even use variables, for example, to enter the current date.

Cropping

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The one image editing tool the app does have is a crop tool, seeing as cropping is often one of the earliest steps in photo workflows. A lightning-bolt button lets you quickly create snapshot images of your crops. The tool also lets you rotate images, and you can set constraints or do free cropping, but I'd prefer preset aspect ratio choices as even the free Microsoft Photos app has.

Watermarking

From the Save As, Export, Printing Proofs, Upload, or Send Photos via Email dialogs, you can choose Watermark, in the Operations group.

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With this option, you can choose a font, size, color, and position for the watermark. You can even upload a watermark image in PNG, PSD, or TIFF format. You can't see how the watermark will look before you export the image, however.

Ingesting Photos

Aside from simply viewing and organizing photos in your file system, a key function of Photo Mechanic is to ingest images from a camera memory card—that is, move them from the card to computer storage and add them to the program's catalog database. You start the process from the Ingest entry on the File menu. Having an Ingest button on the interface would improve the experience, though happily, the dialog pops into view whenever you stick a memory card into the computer, and you can invoke it with the Ctrl-G keyboard shortcut. The dialog shows your choices for ingestion.

(Credit: PCMag/Camera Bits)

You can ingest from not only media (called disks in the app) but also folders or a selection in the Contact Sheet view. You need to set a primary destination and optionally a secondary. At import, you can apply a local or global metadata template to the images, rename them to a specified sequence using variables, and erase or unmount the disk after the operation.

Tethering

Photo Mechanic's Live Ingest feature lets the app watch folders and immediately import anything that lands in said folder, as well as work as a tethering feature—direct from camera. You can set this option to wait for both members of a raw+JPEG pair, or to wait for a specified time for raw files to become stable.

One problem with tethering in Photo Mechanic is that you still need other software to accomplish it. Lightroom Classic, Capture One, and Photo Director actually let you control the camera from the software, but Photo Mechanic just watches the tether target folder and ingests what arrives there.

How Fast Does Photo Mechanic Import Photos?

Since speed to getting to your photos is one of Photo Mechanic's main claims to fame, I tested import speed using 200 raw images (6GB total) from a Canon 80D. My test computer was aWindows 10 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 discrete graphics card. I imported from a Class 4 SDHC card to a fast SSD on the PC.

Photo Mechanic posted a time of 154 seconds, which was significantly faster than Lightroom took to perform the same import. It was neck-and-neck with Zoner Photo Studio's leading 153 seconds and Capture One Pro's 155 seconds.

Printing and Output

From Photo Mechanic, you can upload to FTP or several popular photo hosts like Flickr and SmugMug. I've hooked up dozens of programs to Flickr in the past, but Photo Mechanic's process gave me some trouble. The account creator isn't as clear as in other apps. I did get to the point where I okayed the app on the Flickr website, but then when I returned to Photo Mechanic and tried to upload, I got an error message saying the program hadn't downloaded my photo sets yet. Luckily, closing the upload dialog and trying again fixed this.

Photo Mechanic also can display ad-hoc full-screen slideshows (hidden at the bottom of the Image menu). You can set the time between changing photos and whether to show text associated with the file and even choose the font. Looping and random shuffle of images is also possible, but adding background music isn't. You can create a video file of your slideshow to send to others. A Live Slideshow choice displays any photos that appear in a specified folder.

You can print contact sheets and proofs from Photo Mechanic, choosing grid sizes and orientation, but there's no print preview like you get in Lightroom Classic. Also missing is Lightroom Classic's soft proofing, but that of course makes more sense after you've adjusted and edited the photo.

Who Should Buy Photo Mechanic?

Anyone who needs meticulous metadata, including some professional photographers, may find Photo Mechanic useful. But in truth, it hails from the time before Lightroom, when photographers using Photoshop needed this kind of separate workflow tool. One feather in its cap is faster import than Lightroom Classic as well as its ability to browse images without having to import. That said, Lightroom Classic is a much fuller version that handles those metadata needs with aplomb, making it our Editors' Choice winner among photo workflow software.