I learned of Photo Mechanic from a Light Room Q&A forum. I downloaded the trail versions for both XP and Mac yesterday, had a very helpful conversation with Bob on technical staff, and I was off and running in solving my problems. My main one is directly related to the topic of this thread, so here it is. I still use film, almsot exclusively Velvia 100F now. I have a Nikon Coolpix 5000 scanner with stack loader which can take about 50 slides at a time. When I return from a trip rather than using a light table as I did until last year, I immediately scan in all of my slides and use LR ( I used bridge until LR came out). Each scan is about 110 Mb since I figure it is easier to scan at highest res, 16 bit and cull later rather than having to rescan the pick of the crop. Last month I returned from a trip with over 30 rolls of film. WHile shooting I religeously keep a pocket notebook with basic info - eg, which camera, lens, filter, date, and subject. Although tedious, I like to get this info connected with the digital version of the image. I am also scanning in my entire slide collection which now has about 20,000 saved images. SInce I travel a great deal and have a lot of time for simple diting tasks on the road I copy all of my scans to jpg of about 500Kb in size. This allows me to keep thousands on my small Windows laptop. But neither LR nor Bridge have the capability to transfer any of the info I put into XMP of the jpgs back into the TIFs on my MacPro. So I would just tediously copy the star ratings, any color coding and the flags from LR by hand from laptop to desktop. Delving more into the metadata was just too much, so I'd do what I could when I got home. Pretty inefficient. The LR folks had no solution or workaround for transferring the data, but did suggest PM. WHen I spoke withBob he suggested trying the following: rename the .tif files as .cr2 files, copy the jpgs into the same directory. Make sure the basenames of the files in pairs are the same At thsi point PM lumps matching files together. Then use the "update IPTC/XMP. Voila! I tell it to read the metadata from the jpg and write it to the CR2 and it does it for all files. THIS IS GREAT! It means I can do much of my meta data entry on the road with PM (which for this is much more user friendly than LR) and then transfer it back to the TIFF. Bob told me that I needed CR2 extension as this is the only type of RAW file for which this work around works at present (seems that PM doesn't care that it isnt really a .CR2 file). What is cludgy about this is the need to do the renaming twice. SO I STRONGLY BACK THE REQUEST TO ALLOW RAW+TIFF, JPG SYNCTRONIZATION. Also, since am considering switching to a Nikon D200, it would be good if this technique would work with other than CR2 files. ALSO it would be good if the SYNCH also synched the star rating, color codes, and flags from LR.
