Photo Mechanic

Photo Mechanic is a photographer's image browser tool. It is the answer for professional digital photographers looking for a fast and easy-to-use image browser for digital camera files. Photo Mechanic's innovative batch captioning, renaming, speedy browsing, and Photoshop connectivity features have made it the choice of thousands of photojournalists and professional photographers worldwide. Optimized for use with professional cameras from Nikon, Canon, Olympus and Pentax, Photo Mechanic has become the standard tool for digital image browsing.

Photo Mechanic is a standalone image browser that lets you view your digital photos with convenience and speed. Photo Mechanic displays the "thumbnails" of photos on a camera disk or folder in familiar "contact sheet" display windows. You can quickly rotate, preview, copy, delete, tag, rename, and add caption / keyword (IPTC news record) information to photos both individually and in batches. Photo Mechanic helps you find the best photo amongst several similar shots with its preview display that lets you flip through a group of selected photos at high resolution. Photo Mechanic can then pass the photos you select on to Adobe Photoshop for image retouching.

Photo Mechanic's unique Image Variable technology unleashes the power of metadata. Metadata can be information saved with each photo such as image capture data or IPTC fields, or other information like the current date and time. Standard image capture data like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focal length can be accessed through "variables" and tucked-away in any IPTC field such as the caption. You can also use variables representing the current or capture time, date, or frame number, for example, for file renaming purposes. IPTC fields can be extracted using variables for use in renaming - even the filename variable can be placed in an IPTC field. One important variable called the sequence variable can be used for sequential naming or to serialize certain IPTC fields. In all, Photo Mechanic has more than 60 variables that enable customized workflows for captioning and renaming photos. The possibilities are endless!

Photo Mechanic can also print contact sheets and export HTML for Web pages. You can control the layout and size of your thumbnails, and even use Photo Mechanic's image variables to customize the text for thumbnail titles and page headers or footers, making Photo Mechanic one of the most flexible tools available for formatting your output.

• Improved the look of the user interface to a more professional dark background.
• Added support for numerous IPTC Extension and PLUS licensing fields.
• Movie files can now be captioned with IPTC using an XMP sidecar file.
• The IPTC dialogs can now be customized to show only the fields of concern, their order in the dialog, and the field headers.
• Improved the speed of browsing by using a faster JPEG implementation (since JPEGs are used for the internal disk cache of thumbnails and previews).
• Ingest can now automatically begin upon mounting of flash cards.
• Added the ability to choose maximum file size (with a minimum quality) for the JPEG Save As command.
• You can now upload a photo directly from the IPTC Info dialog.
• Improved the speed of sorting and filtering by using an internal database cache for image preferences such as rating and for image capture time.
• Added the ability to sort by Date or Name in the Favorites / Navigator panes.
• Added a Tasks section underneath the Navigator to show Ingest and Upload status.
• The Preview window is now non-modal so it can be kept open on a second monitor.
• The Preview window can now be configured to display thumbnails on the left or on the bottom.
• Added a snapshot menu for Set Info Text configurations in the Preview window.
• The Preview window can now show blown highlights and underexposed shadows.
• Crops can now be rotated to arbitrary angles to match the horizon. Crops are now stored in XMP using the Adobe ACR namespace and are therefore recognized by Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom and other applications that use the same XMP namespace.
• Crops can be removed in a batch using the Tool menu command "Remove Crops."
• Constrained crops can now have non-integral ratios (e.g. 2.5 x 2).
• Movie files can be played back in the preview window. Crops can be applied and stills can be extracted (via Save As).
• When browsing directly from a flash card (which is NOT recommended), Photo Mechanic will not modify the contents of files to record user preferences such as tag, color class, rating, and crops. Changes to IPTC are also not saved. This change was made to avoid problems with allocating additional space on full disks.