is there a way to allow the ingest operation to mark files as read only? i tried to search the posts but didnt find anything relative.
Photo Mechanic actually considers in camera Protect as a tag on the image to help searching through images more quickly instead of making them read-only. This way even read only images can be changed by Photo Mechanic like they wouldn't be read-only.
In exchange you can select your keepers in camera and quickly find them after ingest or even set the ingest to download them first to allow a quick edit and transmission if needed.