Hi Kirk,
Please consider a philosophical change to the question of “what to catalog?” Currently Photo Mechanic Plus catalogs every file type it understands and the user must explicitly exclude undesired files from the catalog. I propose that the default behavior for PM+ is to include only files that are explicitly stated. My rationale for this is simple: I currently have a moderate collection containing many file types (psd, tiff, afphoto, afdesign, fpa, auh, etc.). I save all documents in their native formats, but I also save each file as a jpg. To keep my catalog small and simple, I only catalog the jpgs since the other formats are redundant from my cataloging perspective. Currently, I have nearly one million jpgs cataloged. Adding the other formats would increase the size of my database, but would do nothing to aid me in finding desired images.
PM+ continually increases the types of files it can catalog. Unfortunately, so do I as I periodically add new software to my set of tools. Currently, for every new filetype, I must remember to exclude its addition from my catalog. Changing to the “explicitly included” model, I would not need to change anything since the new file types are excluded by default (after I set .jpg to be the only filetype to be cataloged).
I recognize that many of your customers may want to catalog everything. The default list of files to import could be “*.*” to include everything. For people like me, the list could easily be changed to .jpg or whichever files we need to include. This is a much simpler process to manage from the end users’ perspective.
Thanks for your consideration.
Marv
