After nearly 20 years of using PM, I'm among those who, with deep regret, will not be able to commit the subscription, but...
Camerabits is a small company producing a specialist product with outstanding technical support. It is a product, which as far as I am aware is unique and the code replacement tools as well as its speed make it well worth the subscription to those who need the program. You can't compare the cost to a mass market product like Adobe Lightroom, or even Capture One, which in it's own way, is a bit of a niche product from a small company. Even if it's still a far bigger company than Camera Bits.
The time saved and the avoidance of human error by partially automating the culling, captioning, keywording, file renaming etc means that for the customers that PM is aimed at, PM could easily recover its subscription costs on a single job.
If I was still in professional photography, or indeed on a larger pension, I would be happy to pay the new subscription costs just to allow me to spend less time at the computer. As well as being confident of continual improvement and excellent technical support.
Since the subscription announcement, I've been trialling using LR and C1 (both of which already use) to do the parts of the workflow I currently do with Photo Mechanic. I've also tried out a trial of another DAM, which offers a macro language which should duplicate some of PM capabilities. I also already use Neofinder and Fast Raw Viewer as they both offer capabilities that PMPlus doesn't.
However, none of these, not even in combination match the ingestion and metadata management capability of Photo Mechanic, The DAM with macro language that I trialled had some problems and it's now over a week since I emailed technical support, with so far, no reply.
PM technical support have always replied within 18 hours (it's probably quicker than this because of the time differences, but I always have a reply waiting for me the morning after I sent it).
Personally, I'm not all that happy with the situation, as I was hoping for something like Topaz does, where there s an initial larger purchase price and then a $99 annual update.
However, I can understand the need for a more reliable cash flow and the benefits of a smaller more specialist customer base with a strong commitment to using PM.
A small example of something I seem to only be able do in PM is to include the last three numbers of a camera's serial number in the file name on ingest
I have a work around this by manually changing the normal file prefix in camera to match the serial number e.g change DSC to 440.
BUT, I used to use this in camera using the Nikon memory banks) so I could quickly change the file prefix to match different aspects of a days shooting. I didn’t do it very often but I now can't do it at all.
Once you get used to PM, it's very difficult, and rather sad, to leave it behind, but needs must.
I wish everyone at Camerabits all the very best and give them thanks for all the, sometimes very detailed, technical support they have given me over the years.
