Todd,
I am evaluating 4.5.2 for the Mac and I have a folder with 1300 images. About half are Photoshop files. The rest are TIFFs and JPGs.
Photo Mechanic is extremely slow to load the images and gives the SPOD often and the hard drive just GRINDS away. I'm talking more than 5 minutes to load the images, closer to ten so far and counting. I've tried this same folder three separate occasions and it's the same each time.
Is Photo Mechanic not very compatible with Photoshop Images?
Photo Mechanic uses QuickTime to load PSD images. QuickTime is unfortunately not very multithread-safe so we can only make it load one image at a time.
QuickTime also crashes when loading really large PSD files so we have code to determine "too large" PSD files and we skip loading them.
Adobe PSD images are pretty much a proprietary format nowadays so they're hard to render. PSD files were last publicly documented a number of years ago (I think in the Photoshop 5.5 timeframe.) We are working on a solution to load the "composite image" if present in the 4.6 version of Photo Mechanic, which *will* be multithread-safe, so the performance should improve.
PM may not meet your needs at this time.
-Kirk