Photo Mechanic also has its drawbacks though:
-No pixel editing abilities
As mentioned before, you can’t make any level adjustments in Photo Mechanic. This means you must do your postproduction in another photo editing program. You must be cautious of your workflow in this case because, as discussed in my previous article, many photo editing programs strip EXIF data from your pictures. I like to select my favorites in Photo Mechanic, batch rename them, do post production in iPhoto and Photoshop and then add my keywords.
-Unable to view full screen
I miss iPhoto’s full screen view. I used it all the time for short listing my favorites and even as a slide show, usually with iTunes running in the background.
-Slide show is lacking
Photo Mechanic’s transitions are not as smooth as iPhotos. There is also to way to select music however, I never used the music feature in iPhoto either. I preferred to leave iTunes playing in the background, this way the music wouldn’t loop or abruptly stop when the show was over.
-Image reduction quality
Graphic Converter clearly does the best job when it comes reducing photo quality and size. Using both programs, I reduce the same image to same dimensions and roughly the same size in kilobytes and Graphic Converter yielded substantially better images even though they were smaller in size!
Original Canon Image Reduced to 1280 1.1mb
Graphic Converter Reduced to 1280 Quality 50 56kb
Photo Mechanic Reduced to 1280 Quality 10 64kb!
Even before being cropped at 100% the Photo Mechanic image shows tons of artifacts and pixilation.
Today’s Workflow
Photo Mechanic
-Drag a drop photo folder on Photo Mechanic to open a “New Contact Sheet”
-Rank only the photos I wish to take – First Shortlist
-Do a second shortlist... third shortlist... fourth shortlist...
-Batch Rename using a 001-Name sequence
iPhoto
-Import photos and do my postproduction crops, levels etc -Images that need Photoshop-ing are dragged and dropped into Photoshop from iPhoto, edited and saved
-Export edited images from iPhoto back into the original folder (overwriting the originals)
Photo Mechanic
-Open IPTC info window and load/make a template
-Press the copy button
-Press the paste button for each new photo and fill in the keywords
-In the end I have found it’s faster to tag each photo individually rather than try and batch tag them. With batch tagging you usually end up missing something or getting confused and having to start over.
Graphic Converter
-Run a pre-made Graphic Converter script, simply by
left clicking on the selected images in the finder,
which reduce my photos to a maximum width or 1280
pixels at 40% of the original quality. The folder
containing the 22 original images weighs in at 45
megabytes. When reduced it is a mere 3.1 megabytes with
no visible image degradation visible when viewed on a
monitor
Back Up
-Move the originals to my external
-Move a copy of the reduced images to my external
-Keep my 2,500+ reduced photos (535 megabytes total) on my Mac
Final words
As you can see, it’s still a major process to get a photo from my camera to flickr. If twenty-four photos make it to flickr then they represent about an hours worth of work. At this point, it’s the easiest, fastest and highest quality method I’ve come up with to date.
I hope this article can help some of you with your photo collections. Leave a comment or a question should you have one.