PhotoMechanic – First Impressions Review

I literally just tried PhotoMechanic for the first time and I have to say, I am very impressed!

Lightroom is notoriously slow!

I’ve tried rendering 1:1 Previews…

I’ve tried rendering Smart Previews…

I’ve tried culling through Windows…

All have been painfully slow!

So slow to the point that for my personal family photos, I don’t even bring them into Lightroom anymore, I shoot RAW+JPG then move JPG’s to a separate folder and cull from JPG. Then just deal with the JPG’s never looking at the RAWs because I can’t bare to deal with Lightroom and how slow it is!

However, for professional shoots, I have no choice and I need to edit the photos to get a more polished look.

I’ve been waiting for a relatively big professional shoot before installing the trial version of PhotoMechanic and today was that day.

My workflow is usually copying the photos onto my laptop HDD, then creating a Lightroom Catalogue for the shoot, render 1:1 Previews and leave it rendering overnight.

Wake up in the morning and then cull via Library Module.

Even with 1:1 Previews rendered, it still lags when cycling through images and zooming in.

I’ve heard of PhotoMechanic, but not used it prior and I just gave it a quick whirl now and I am extremely impressed!

I just culled through 1300 images down to 500 in next to no time! I did not officially time myself, but I can assure you that it was so quick and not at all painful culling!

Flicking through image to image was instantaneous and now the only images I am importing into Lightroom are the ones I will edit.

Therefore saving me time in my editing process and saving me time on rendering these previews!

One thing to note is that I culled through Sony A7RII files which are 42.4mp. They rendered faster than low res JPG’s in Windows (Not scientifically tested of course lol)…

Matthew Saville from SLR Lounge did recommend Nikon NX2 as a free option, however it is only compatible with my Nikon cameras and currently I shoot both Sony and Nikon. So I may take the plunge with this purchase.

After my trial expires I’ll test out Nikon NX2. Tonight however, I used my Sony system for this birthday party so I needed PhotoMechanic.