![]() ![]() ![]() If you’re a Lightroom user then you know full well what I’m talking about. Notice the last word “ wait.” Why must we wait? Should we passively just accept that’s just the way it is ― well nope, it doesn’t have to be that way, there are solutions to these kinds of problems, it has a name and its called Photo Mechanic 5 and its here to rescue you from Lightroom’s achilles heel(its weak point) ― importing images that just take to damn long. Snap, chimp, snap, chimp, repeat that process a few times, get home, load card to the pc/laptop/card reader, click on Lightroom, import photos, and now we wait. Now lets fast forward to the process at hand. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that, it should be other way around, we have to be the master of our software, our gear, our strobes, we’re in control, we’re the thinking being in this equation. We hate software to become the slave of our software, don’t we. We make images and we must see them as fast possible. Parting from this premise, photographers have a common thread, and I believe all photographers probably will agree with me on this. If its a new camera, let us say, the new Ricoh GR, then we want it now and can’t wait for the dealers to have their copies so we look elsewhere perhaps another country, Amazon and Ebay are always slave to our wants and needs and so it goes. Well, I don’t see a problem with that, we want what we want right and time is money as they say or if not money, quality time with our loved ones. Basically technology has helped us evolve into this kind of insatiable and impatient being. Now, us, as members of this world are plague with impatience, we click on the browser and the page must load now, it has to load now, its why we pay for fast internet and so forth. As a preamble to this “software is usually developed to solve a problem or make a function better,” that’s the basic premise of software. I make images, then have to go through the process of selecting the ones I want to edit and you the rest, not to mention I forget to label things, keyword, in short, a freaking nightmare sometimes. Well, its what regular photographers do as well. First, the tools I’m presently using to get from “A” to B.” A lot of specialized professional photographers shoot hundreds of images and then have to go through the process of culling them, keywording, labels, etc, nothing new here right, its the way of the photojournalist, its what they do. I can usually find a single picture out of 300,000-400,000 pictures in less than 30 minutes.Well, my workflow is much like that. The single most important thing is for YOU to develop a comprehensive strategy that works for you. Lastly, don't look to software to solve archival tracking issues. With the cost of hard drives so low, multiple very large drives are the way to go, if you plan on having lots of pictures. They are not as stable as you might think, you end up fragmenting our image files into small junks of 4.2GB (unless you go blu-ray.and then it is small 50GB junks). In terms of archival-tracking, I would never ever ever use CD or DVD. Over the years, I have had several drive failures, but have not lost any pictures to the best of my knowledge (knock on wood). ![]() Backups and archives are generated with SuperDuper. All images are available to me on a couple of RAID 5 drives and they are backed up and they are archived to an offsite drive. I am managing between 30,000-40,000 images per year with a combination of Aperture/Photoshop and my collection goes back to 2001. I was leaning towards Photo Mechanic, but I think I may give this IDimager a try-Oops! It's Windows-only!-I'm OS X (although I may switch to a Core i7, 64-bit Windows7 machine for its price/performance advantage). Of the applications listed above, the one I see used most often by photo editors is Photo Mechanic. IDimager : haven't seen anyone using this, but it looks pretty good. It'll certainly be worth re-evaluating when v2.0 is released. Even in its current version, it has some interesting, and unique, DAM-related features. Unfortunately, it's apparently suffering from version 1.x-itis, and is reportedly very unstable in its current iteration. Phase One Media Pro 1: An old favorite, formally known as, iView MediaPro/Microsoft Expression Media, is now owned by Phase One, and has been re-branded as Media Pro 1. ACDSee: used by a number of major media photo editors. Photo Mechanic: used by a number of major media photo editors. Adobe Bridge: used by a number of major media photo editors. Custom: One of the largest digital workflow vendors, Industrial Color, again, uses their own software. Custom: Getty/WireImage uses proprietary DAM software. I'm deciding on my primary digital-asset management/cataloging software. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |