In an effort move away from Lightroom -> Photomechanic Pro I have some questions

[photohippo]

I have been a Photo Mechanic user for a while.

I started out using Apple Aperture and I was quite happy with it.

I have not (yet) gotten to the point where I am happy using Lightroom as my DAM,
even after several years of use. Plus I find it slow.

I am also wanting to move away from Adobe's subscription model.

I got Capture One, which is great for a lot of things but being a DAM that meets my requirements
is not one of them.
I am wondering about adopting Plus as my DAM
I am curious about the features of Plus.
I have some questions:

Two other DAMs (at least per marketing) seem to be ACDsee and iMatch
Unfortunately, they seem to be Windows only, which is a problem.
I can adjust to it but I would prefer not to.

Facial and object recognition is a killer feature that is lacking with Photo Mechanic Plus.

I seem to be able to fill that gap with Capture Pro
https://caption-pro.com/ but then it is
subscription per month again, but a charge per image processed.
and images are processed in the cloud I believe (not sure).

They explicitly mention that they complement Photo Mechanic

Caption Pro is an innovative Mac & Windows app that makes editing metadata more accurate, less stressful, and up to 5x faster. Think of it as the captioning side of Photo Mechanic but with self improving facial recognition.


iMatch can do it without sending any information to the cloud
or so they claim.

• Does anyone have experience with Caption Pro
• Are the photos still stored in a file system structure?
  That is directly accessible lets say with Photoshop?
  (As opposed to stored in some form of a database, or proprietary structure.
  Does the DAM get confused if a photo is not moved but edited directly?
• What is the backup story?
• Can the "database" be stored on a NAS?
• I have a Mac machine and a Windows machine can they access the same database?
• If so how is the database stored for sharing?
• Will the database understand multiple versions of the same file or do they have different names

[Kirk Baker]

Does anyone have experience with Caption Pro

I have never heard of it before.

Note: my answers to the following questions assume that you're now asking about Photo Mechanic Plus and not Caption Pro.

Are the photos still stored in a file system structure?  That is directly accessible lets say with Photoshop?
(As opposed to stored in some form of a database, or proprietary structure.

Photo Mechanic Plus catalogs your images where they are.  No filesystem structure is modified.  Nothing proprietary.

Does the DAM get confused if a photo is not moved but edited directly?

It shouldn't as long as the filename remains the same.

What is the backup story?

Quit Photo Mechanic Plus.  Perform your own backup strategy.  I suggest using something that does incremental backups.  The proxies files will make up the bulk of the catalog (folder) disk space usage but they don't change frequently so they won't be backed up if you use something incremental.  I like 'rsync' (there are GUI versions available.)

Can the "database" be stored on a NAS?

Yes, but it would so slow as to be entirely unusable.

I have a Mac machine and a Windows machine can they access the same database?

Yes, but I don't recommend it.  And they definitely cannot both be using the catalog at the same time.  You would have to quit one before starting the other.  Also, when you update the catalog (adding images), the other platform won't know where the images are and you'll have to do a "Reintegrate Forgotten Catalog" operation to sync this up.

There's not much use for sharing the catalogs since the majority of the data comes from the images themselves.  Only the Collection data is created by the user and not represented by the metadata in the images.

If so how is the database stored for sharing?

There is no specific sharing feature.

Will the database understand multiple versions of the same file or do they have different names

Photo Mechanic Plus does not have a versioning feature.

-Kirk

[photohippo]

Thank you very much for your kind and helpful reply.
I had put some rather dumb questions in there.