How the Catalog works in 7 Pro

[Jon Paul Davidson]

Unfortunately, I found out about the Beta (which includes your new catalog feature) 3 days before it was to expire.  I've written about a need for a catalog several times over the last few years (have been using PM since May, 2015), and was surprised that I was not asked to participate in the Beta when it became available.  I have over 80,000 images cataloged with Extensis' Portfolio, as i bought it some years ago when they welcomed individual users.  It is now designed for huge libraries and the price has (understandably)  escalated through the roof!  I need to move to your new catalog, but to prepare for it, I would like to know something about how it works.  If there are postings about that, please let me know where to find them.  It looks like the process generates another copy of the image.  Since my collection occupies several terabytes, I hope that is not the case, but I do wish to work with the IPTC data as search strings and in the short time I had to explore the Beta, it looks like what you are doing is exactly what i want and will welcome upgrading from the excellent features of Version 6 i am now using.  I have tried everywhere, but cannot seem to find an explanation of what "Ingest" actually does relative to the cataloging since i have in the past only used that feature in 6 to open a folder of images on which i need to add or assign iptc data.  When I close the application, I have assumed the copy just disappeared as all the data then resided in my originals.

Any help you can point me to -- even a beta of the new manual that explains things--since I no longer have access to anything when the Beta timed out.  Thanks. - Jon Davidson

[Hayo Baan]

Hi Jon Paul,

If you have a license for PM6 you can still make use of the beta for PM+ (you can find the new one in the Announcements section of the forum). The betas themselves expire, but a new one is made available before expiry for as long as PM+ is in beta testing.

Similar to how the rest of PM works, it does not make a copy of the images you want to work with/add to your catalog. To enable e.g. off-line use, it does create previews of all the catalog images though, this can still take up quite some additional space. If your files are on an internal drive, you can skip generating these previews. This is a per Catalog option, be sure to set it prior adding the images to the catalog (“scan to catalog” in PM speak).

Ingest is completely separate from the catalog and is the process of moving (copying) images from e.g. a memory card to your hard drive. You should NOT use ingest to work with images that are already on your hard drive since that will create a copy (unless this is what you want, of course, but from your account that wasn't what you wanted). Instead you simply open the folder with those images as a contact sheet within PM.

Apart from the README found with the beta there no real documentation for PM+ yet, but I'm sure – assuming you are familiar with PM6 itself – once you've played with PM+ a bit you will start to understand how it works anyway. One of the things that may be confusing at first is the fact that PM+ supports multiple catalogs in parallel. Once you get the hang of this, you'll appreciate this ability. But it does add complexity so at first it my be confusing/involve extra steps (e.g. you have to tell PM which catalog(s) you want to perform actions on).

Try it out! Hopefully my answers here already helped, but if you have further questions, post them on the forum.

[Kirk Baker]

Any help you can point me to -- even a beta of the new manual that explains things--since I no longer have access to anything when the Beta timed out.  Thanks. - Jon Davidson

Everything that Hayo said is on the mark.  Here is the message board where we announce the new Photo Mechanic Plus betas:

http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?board=15.0

Please do participate in the Beta, Jon Paul.

-Kirk