Disabling Already Imported Photos?

[gabster]

Hi gang!

I am just starting to discover the potentials of culling photos with Photomechanic compared to the Import functionality in Lightroom. Fantastic performance!
I've been watching Dan Carr's tutorials on youtube, specifically about the possibility of doing a selective ingest via the "Copy selected photos" in the contact sheet.
Now that's absolutely great, but since I tend to have multiple events shot on one card, what I currently do in Lightroom is import those certain groups of photos into their dedicated folders. Then returning to the Import tab, I already see what's been imported and what not bu the slightly grayed out thumbnail.

Is there a trick in PM that could do the same thing by any chance?

Now, I know that I could simply import the whole card and re-arrange the events afterwards in Lightroom, but I thought it would be nice to have that sort of functionality in PM as well.

I am curious to know what others are doing?

thanks a lot!
gabi

[gabster]

Just thought of bumping this one up. Anyone has any advice? Specially when the result would be dng instead of full raw. I guess I am more after a select-apply IPTC-convert to DNG workflow.
thanks

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

Hi gabi,

It's hard to say exactly what will work for you, but I will share my experience. After thinking much about how to work around "selective ingest" I have found that, for me, it is almost always just fastest to ingest the whole card (Into a folder I call "Incoming"), and then use Photo Mechanic's fast sorting and tagging ability to then organize the pictures in the contact sheet. When I have multiple events, I will often sort by capture time and slide the "thumbnail size" slider all the way down so that I can see lots of images in the contact sheet. Then I can select the first image in a series, scroll to the end of that series, hold down shift and click the end of the series and then I can rename, move into folder, tag, apply IPTC etc. If I move them (or import them into Lightroom), they will disappear from the 'Incoming" Contact Sheet. So I always know that "Incoming" is the Contact sheet of things that need to be dealt with, and I Can work through it methodically until it's all sorted.  With a little practice, this has become so fast that I don't think too much about it.

This may or may not help you, but I hope that it does.

-Mick

[gabster]

Mick!

Thanks so much for the reply. It sure helps tremendously! And it helps to have all worked on a more secure place than directly on the card itself.
Curious to know if you leave the photos in their raw format or if you convert to dng. If you convert them, where do you make the conversion - in PM or Lr?
thanks a ton!
Gabi

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

So far I have been leaving things in Raw as it works for me.  I have been pondering creating an Automator action in OSX that would watch my Incoming folder and run Adobe's DNG Converter on it so that it wouldn't even be an extra step, but I haven't done the legwork on that yet, since I haven't run into a situation where Raw didn't work just fine for me. But, yes, Photo Mechanic also does the conversion just fine.

-Mick

[gabster]

Thanks a lot Mick for your help!

cheers!