Hello everyone,
I'm pleased to announce that the public beta of Photo Mechanic 4.5 is available for download
here.
You can read the press release
here.
Version Information
Version 4.5
* Added full support for Unicode (UTF-8) IPTC editing. Also added the ability to specify the IPTC character encoding (e.g. Mac Roman, Microsoft Latin1 + Euro) when Unicode is not used.
* Added a new Structured Keywords panel for applying terms from a hierarchical keyword database such as the Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog (CVKC) (sold separately at
www.controlledvocabulary.com). The keyword database is customizable and ships with a sample database of animals and world regions from the CVKC. (For now this feature is Mac OS X only. The Windows version will appear in an early update to the 4.5 version.)
* Added a separate Keyword pane (floating window).
* The HTML Exporter now uses templates that are written in Ruby, a powerful scripting language. You can create your own templates or use third party templates that are compatible with Photo Mechanic.
* The IPTC dialogs are now resizable and include the additional IPTC and XMP fields for Location, Scene, Subject Code, Intellectual Genre, Rights Usage, and Contact Info fields.
* Photos can now be arranged in an arbitrary order with the Arrangement sort type. A multi-folder arrangement can also be saved as a favorite.
* Added a five star rating system, compatible with other applications such as Adobe Bridge, in addition to the existing color class labels (XMP must be enabled for other applications to read the star rating). The star rating also transfers to PhotoShelter when uploading photos. Also added a Remap command to convert color class labels to star ratings or vice-versa.
* Added a new Live Slide Show feature that watches a folder for incoming photos (e.g. from wireless transmission) and displays these in a slide show.
* Added optional sharpening of thumbnails and previews within Photo Mechanic and for JPEGs exported with HTML.
* (Mac) Added a new Show Map command to plot a photo with embedded GPS coordinates in a window using Google maps.
* (Mac) The contact sheet windows now use tabs so that a single window can contain multiple contact sheets. The tabs can be re-arranged and moved between windows.
* Added the ability to recursively open subfolders from the Navigator and Favorites.
* Thumbnail labels in the contact sheet can now be customized with multiple lines of information using variables.
* Added variable substring extraction by using index and length qualifiers inside of variables. For example, {filenamebase:0:5} returns the first 5 characters of the filename, and {filenamebase:-5,5} extracts the last five characters of the filename (ignoring the extension).
* IPTC Snapshots taken are now added to a "stack" of snapshots. This stack can be accessed when pasting an IPTC Snapshot via the contextual menu.
* The Ingest Progress window now combines the progress from multiple ingest processes into a single window.
* The thumbnail gallery in the Preview window now scrolls horizontally instead of vertically.
* File types that aren't recognized as photos by Photo Mechanic can be viewed as a proxy in the contact sheet so they can be renamed, copied, deleted, etc.
* (Win) Added preliminary support for Microsoft Windows Vista.
