Camera Bits Photo Mechanic 5 for Mac

Whatever area of photography you work in, or even if you're only just starting out in the field of photography, having a decent organiser tool at your disposal will reap untold benefits for your workflow. Applications like Adobe Lightroom or Bridge do the job well enough, but Photo Mechanic 5 truly excels as a photo organiser.

This software is purely for organising your images; aside from rotation and cropping, you won't find any image-editing tools here. But it will take you through every step of the image-organising process, right from when you extract the images. It starts with the Ingest process. Use this to import from multiple cards simultaneously and modify your images' keywords, captions, IPTC data. Mechanic uses IPTC Stationary Pads and variables to make the process more flexible, so you can write contact and copyright information too.

Once you're done, you can save your images in any commonly used file type you need, or use one of the many export options. The feature to export as a web gallery is unfortunately the weakest element of this software: without preview options, it's difficult to gauge how your web gallery will look until
you've actually generated it.

If you're working as part of a team, save time editing by using Photo Mechanic to export preferences and sharing them, to make sure everyone is using the same settings. Photo Mechanic also includes support for colour management and includes a default profile, which can be automatically assigned to
images lacking in a profile.

One of Mechanic's main caveats is its unintuitive Ul design; even experienced photo editors will benefit from reading the documentation. Still, Photo Mechanic exists as a tool to speed up the file management process, and none of its tools make that clearer than the Ingest process. The ability to create automatic backups and assign variables in one fell swoop may be enough to entice even the most avid Bridge users.