Editing images selected outside Photo Mechanic.

[Skids]

Photography is my hobby and at the moment I am using an Intel only version of Photo Mechanic Plus to manage my image collection on my Apple Mac computer.  With the announcement by Camera Bits that they are no longer selling the universal version of Photo Mechanic Plus I have recognised that I have to seek an alternative DAM software or system.

Unfortunately it appears to me that most other applications treat metadata as an after thought utilising tiny data entry fields, only implementing a small subset of the possible tags and/or corrupting the existing metadata.  So I have down loaded the latest version of Photo Mechanic to see if I can devise a way of using it in addition to image injest or Finder folders.

Photo Mechanic includes an option to "Search my Mac" which conducts a Spotlight search.  Unfortunately this is somewhat of a blunt instrument especially as Spotlight does not search for metadata.  Instead, as far as I can see, it searches on file name, Finder comments and Finder tags and is not a great deal of use (to me).  However, using the search tool does demonstrate that Photo Mechanic is able to work with images that are saved in different locations.

Given how the Spotlight search is displayed is there a way of passing Photo Mechanic a list of file paths for it to open and process ?

For example the utility application FindAnyFile allows a number of search criteria to be entered and it can output a list of files found in either text or json format.

best wishes
Simon

[Kirk Baker]

Simon,

Photography is my hobby and at the moment I am using an Intel only version of Photo Mechanic Plus to manage my image collection on my Apple Mac computer.  With the announcement by Camera Bits that they are no longer selling the universal version of Photo Mechanic Plus I have recognised that I have to seek an alternative DAM software or system.

Unfortunately it appears to me that most other applications treat metadata as an after thought utilising tiny data entry fields, only implementing a small subset of the possible tags and/or corrupting the existing metadata.  So I have down loaded the latest version of Photo Mechanic to see if I can devise a way of using it in addition to image injest or Finder folders.

Photo Mechanic includes an option to "Search my Mac" which conducts a Spotlight search.  Unfortunately this is somewhat of a blunt instrument especially as Spotlight does not search for metadata.  Instead, as far as I can see, it searches on file name, Finder comments and Finder tags and is not a great deal of use (to me).  However, using the search tool does demonstrate that Photo Mechanic is able to work with images that are saved in different locations.

Given how the Spotlight search is displayed is there a way of passing Photo Mechanic a list of file paths for it to open and process ?

No, not currently, but it would be possible to add the feature.

-Kirk

[Skids]

Hi Kirk,

What does its json output look like?  Could you post some here, please?

Yes of course. 

Here are the two file types listing dng files with capture dates falling between two 1st April and 12th April this year.

best wishes
Simon

[Kirk Baker]

Simon,

Is that its own format (the fields and values) or did you customize it in some way?  I'm wanting to know if I were to write code to access the path fields, all json exports from that app would have that path field, or if it is something you added and I cannot count on being there?

Thanks,

-Kirk

[Skids]

Sorry I missed your question.

Both the files are directly exported from the application Find Any File (https://findanyfile.app/) following a search.

I think it would be really useful if Photo Mechanic could accept a list of file paths generated by other applications or just respond to the drag and dropping of files by just displaying those files much in the same way as the results of an internal Spotlight search are displayed.  It would also mean that Spotlight searches could be saved and used in the future.