Hello Kirk! I'd like to add some support for this idea per Andrew's suggestion. For me it would be ideal to ask photo mechanic to sync at a certain time of day. My workflow is below to help you understand how I use it.
So, I come back from an assignment, ingest my cards to the local working drive and then overnight (through chronosync) my computer (on 24/7) is scheduled to sync the drive to the corresponding folder on the server. This happens at 2am every night automatically. That means that I can access the information remotely, it is backed up and if I have dumped stuff from the road to the server, it shows up on the working drive as well.
Photo Mechanic Plus catalog is aimed at the individual folders on that server (one folder/one catalog per year so that I can turn off years/catalogs to speed the search if needed)
It would be super helpful if I could tell photo mechanic to sync the current year's folder at say 4am. That way the catalog is never more than 24 hours out of date.
On the idea of taxing the computer... it's doing the same amount of work, it's just doing it overnight and in smaller increments without me having to remember every couple months to sync.
Make sense? Happy to talk about it. But having auto sync (this could possibly be a standalone plugin that allows photo mechanic to be closed and it still operate) would really boost the idea of using PM+ in rigorous professional environments.
Thanks
Shane