john,
I am demo-ing PM. Looks great so far! Especially handy to me is selecting all soft rotated previews and applying a hard rotate. I have just switched to a mac and have given up my ACDSEE. it has been tough finding a program to do a simple rotate without manually selecting a bunch of images.
One thing that is confusing for me has to do with 'primary destination'. I will likely just drag and drop my images from camera cards into folders without opening PM. but if I did use PM to import would I be able to choose a primary destination for the photos I am 'ingesting' from my card each time. I don't ever want to creat a default or proprietary place that the program tries to put the photos. I will always want to specify a location either on my computer or eternal drive to import photos to. Will the window always pop up and allow me to choose a spot or is it going to try to pick for me after I have done it for the first time?
The Primary destination is just the top level folder where you would have PM put your images as it automatically creates subfolders for you. You can always keep PM from automatically creating subfolders and always choose a different folder each time you Ingest if you like. But why not use the power of PM's Ingest to create your folder hierarchy for you?
You can use {variables} in your folder name which will be dynamically created from the metadata contained within your photos. For instance you could have a Primary destination that is the root folder where all of your photos are organized, and let's say you want to have all photos put into a folder by the year they were shot and then the month they were shot and then the day they were shot. You would set your Primary destination and then in the Folder Naming field you would enter:
{year4}/{month0}/{day0}
Let's say you had these photos on your card:
DSC_1234.JPG shot on Jan 21st 2007,
DSC_1235.JPG shot on Feb 11th 2007,
DSC_1236.JPG shot on March 8th 2007
Photo Mechanic would create a folder structure like this for you:
2007/
01/
21/
DSC_1234.JPG
02/
11/
DSC_1235.JPG
03/
08/
DSC_1236.JPG
This kind of folder naming helps you keep your pictures organized and is just a simple example. You can do much more and use other variables (there are around 200 of them) to create truly useful directory structures.
Any chance that there is a check box somewhere to tell PM to apply the hard rotate to verticals while importing??
We may add that in the future. We haven't done it yet because it makes RAW+JPEGs become out of sync rotation-wise.
HTH,
-Kirk
