Rolf,
first big kudos to the crop-feature saved me a lot of time recently just one suggestion it would be nice to have a command similiar to the "apply rotation to jpegs alt+r"-command that actually applies the cropping (as i always work with duplicated folders).
That's what Save As is for. We just really don't want you to lose your image by replacing it with a cropped version. Could a tool be added to do exactly that? Yes, but it goes against the philosophy of Photo Mechanic.
My big annoyance with Photomechanic is still the tiny keywordfield, i really don't get it aren't the keywords not important to most photographers especially for selling?. I don't have an overview over my applied or to applying keywords many, many mistakes happen because of this. The "edit keywords"-panel doesn't help me anything first you need a second click, second it also don't give you an overview if you have more than 25keywords you have to scroll and third and worst its not possible to sort your keywords in relevancy actually it destroys your sort-order and automatically sort them alphabetically if you dare to use it.
Please have a look at Adobe Bridge i think their keyword-field is really brilliant: The keyword-field in the sidebar automatically adjust it size to show all keywords (using line breaks/automatic word wrap - great!! why it has only be one line in Photomechanic?). You can sort your keywords easily in any personal order - Great! Also you can adjust the metapanel that it only shows the fields you personal work with - in my example only keywords,object name,description and a little bit of the exif-data all other fields i already automatic filled while ingesting (personal data) or i have never a use for them (transmission reference for an example) - so i don't have to see them all the time.
If you use the Datainformation-panel (ctrl+alt+shift+i) in Bridge it's the same as in Photoshop and don't have the auto-size adjust as the side-panel but still it's way better than the keywordfield in Photomechanic and has three lines.
Hmm. Well we haven't had too many complaints about the actual keywords field before this. The keywords as represented in the IPTC data structure is an unordered list. Any application is free to display them in any order that it chooses. You like the way Adobe's products list them. You don't like the way PM lists them. Alphabetical listings are usually preferable since they help one visually search for them in a list.
But really, when you earlier stated that keywords are important for selling, I would have to agree most definitely but I would have to interject that the order of the keywords is entirely insignificant when it comes to using a service like PhotoShelter to search for images containing a specific set of keywords. Order is not important to a database search engine: the photo either contains the keywords you're looking for or it doesn't.
I could make the new scrolling IPTC dialogs have a multi-line keywords field easily enough and will consider doing that in an update.
Oh and i have an incredible long startup-time using windows xp - normal?
It is likely that it is the Favorites and the Navigator reloading/restoring the expanded state of your directory trees that is taking so long. Maybe some of your expanded folder hierarchy is on a server that is temporarily unavailable?
And it would be also nice to have a feature that allows me to decide while i'm applying new keywords (using either IPTC stationary pad or keyword pad) to an picture that has already keywords if new keywords should be added to the end or to the beginning of the already existing keywords
I see. Well you should post that in the Feature requests section then.
-Kirk