Ingest Question from Novice User

[dpnc]

I heard Matt Kloskowski mention Photo Mechanic on one of his videos and thought I'd check it out.

My goal is to AVOID importing a whole SD Card into Lightroom before an initial cull of images. I shoot birds in flight at 10 FPS (soon to be 30 FPS) and therefore I need to cull about 90% of my images.  It's not unusual to shoot 1500 images on a single day. My goal is to avoid importing the 90% that I'll delete right away before I work on the 150 images to arrive at the 20 or 30 keepers. Enter Photo Mechanic!

My question is why do I want to Ingest as opposed to just inserting the card, color coding or rating the images, and then selecting the keepers and dragging them to Lightroom? I tried this today with an SD Card from a game camera (jpgs only) and it worked brilliantly.

What do I gain by ingesting 1500 images onto my hard drive only to delete 1350 of them?

Thanks for any help. I'm still in my trial period but the software is clearly a winner.

[Kirk Baker]

My goal is to AVOID importing a whole SD Card into Lightroom before an initial cull of images. I shoot birds in flight at 10 FPS (soon to be 30 FPS) and therefore I need to cull about 90% of my images.  It's not unusual to shoot 1500 images on a single day. My goal is to avoid importing the 90% that I'll delete right away before I work on the 150 images to arrive at the 20 or 30 keepers. Enter Photo Mechanic!

My question is why do I want to Ingest as opposed to just inserting the card, color coding or rating the images, and then selecting the keepers and dragging them to Lightroom? I tried this today with an SD Card from a game camera (jpgs only) and it worked brilliantly.

What do I gain by ingesting 1500 images onto my hard drive only to delete 1350 of them?

Faster interaction/browsing/culling on a local disk vs. SD card via USB.  The safety in knowing that you still have a backup if one of your images gets damaged (before you format the SD card).

We never recommend editing on the card.  But we also understand that not everyone agrees.  We added Ingest from Selection for that reason.  You can browse the card and add to your overall selection and then ingest only the selected images.

HTH,

-Kirk

[dpnc]

Faster interaction/browsing/culling on a local disk vs. SD card via USB.  The safety in knowing that you still have a backup if one of your images gets damaged (before you format the SD card).

We never recommend editing on the card.  But we also understand that not everyone agrees.  We added Ingest from Selection for that reason.  You can browse the card and add to your overall selection and then ingest only the selected images.

HTH,

-Kirk

OK thanks. So there is no real difference and if I'm not EDITING, but merely selecting images that then get copied into Lightroom, there is no real difference at all. My test was with a card that had only jpgs on it. In real life I shoot raw and end up with 50 MB files from my camera. I can see how that might go quite a bit quicker on a local SSD than an SD Card. I noticed in the tutorial that you can begin viewing/selecting while ingesting too, so no slowdown there.

Thanks for the quick response.