Beginners questions: Ingesting images

[JD-FINEART]

Dear all,

I am a boudoir and beauty photographer from Germany and have downloaded Photo Mechanic for evaluation purposes. Currently I do all my ingesting and culling with Lightroom, however, due to an increasing amount of images and the fact the Lightroom is very... Slow, I am currently looking for a fast alternative.

During the past week, since PM 6 has been released, I have made intensive testing and am struggling with a few things. First:

- When I come home from a shooting weekend I usually have thousands of images from multiple days on my SD card. For ingesting I am looking for a way to copy my image to the SSD with the following scheme: yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/yyyymmdd_A73_[sequence_4-digits].ARW I was able to implement this scheme, however, encountered an issue: The sequence number is counting straight forward throughout the shooting days, however, I wanted to have started the sequence with 0001 on each shooting day. Is there a way in PM to get this realized? Of course, I can reset the sequence within the ingesting dialog, however, that would mean manual effort that I would love to avoid. Lightroom automatically restarted the sequence by shooting day

- From the PM help I have learned that rating the images works with 1-5 keys. However, within PM I saw that I have to press CTRL + 1-5. Can this behavior be changed? Would love to rate just by hitting 1-5

I would be glad to get help from the more experienced PM 6 users 

Thanks a lot in advance!

Joerg

[Kevin M. Cox]

- From the PM help I have learned that rating the images works with 1-5 keys. However, within PM I saw that I have to press CTRL + 1-5. Can this behavior be changed? Would love to rate just by hitting 1-5

Under the PM preferences, go to the Accessibility section. Then "Single Key Shortcuts" and switch the option to "0-5 sets Rating."

[JD-FINEART]

Under the PM preferences, go to the Accessibility section. Then "Single Key Shortcuts" and switch the option to "0-5 sets Rating."

Thanks Kevin, did the trick! Any idea for the sequencing challenge?

Kind regards,
Joerg

[Kevin M. Cox]

I don't have any ideas for the sequencing, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible, just not something I have needed to dive that deeply into myself.

[NurseWizzle]

Did you ever get this figured out, that is what I came here to find.

[JD-FINEART]

Did you ever get this figured out, that is what I came here to find.

Sadly no - it seems that PM does not include this functionality. Contacted support and they confirmed my findings. However, PM is an amazing piece of software and I use it on regular basis.

Best regards,
Joerg

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

While it will not solve your original problem, we might possibly be able to save you a step somewhere else.  I notice you put "A73" in your filename.  I am assuming you are doing this to differentiate your files by camera model. You could put the {model} variable there in the filename and PM will insert the model automatically and then you wouldn't have to change it when you change camera bodies.

Another tip if you want a way to differentiate sequences by day is to add {dow3} itself before or after the sequence, so you could get 0001-MON, 0002-MON, 0003-TUE, 0004-TUE Or you could split your days up into folders on your card in camera and use the {folder} variable before the sequence as well.   Just some ideas to play with.

-Mick

[Kirk Baker]

You could also ingest into a dated folder and then do your renaming after the ingest completes.  You could reset the sequence number at the start of each batch rename.  All of your images shot on the same day would be grouped in their own dated folder.

-Kirk