I am completely done with Photomechanic.

[Dave_W]

After using Photomechanic extensively for the past 7 years (between 500k and 1 million images per year) I am officially done with this program.

I have spent dozens of hours, spent thousands of dollars on new computers, dozens of emails back and forth with tech support, hours on the phone, screensharing, with them even recreating the problems I'm facing on their own machines, and not having a solution to the problem.

I am currently running an international hockey tournament, I'm shooting six consecutive 14 hour days, shooting 10,000 images per day, and Photomechanic does nothing but hang and stall.  I can't ingest, I've tried every conceivable set up that tech support has offered and suggested.  And it still does not work.

I now have to use Windows Explorer to transfer all files from the reader to my hard drive, and then use LR to cull, sort, rate, and rename.

3 of my colleagues working with me experience the same problems and have given up on Photomechanic.   It might be fine for small volume photographers, or Mac computers, but large volume Windows PC users, this program has gone to $hit. It used to be the be-all and end-all. Now it's worthless to me.

7 years!!

[Eric]

I am not going to tell you that you are wrong. I WILL tell you that in my case the solution was moving over to the M4 MBP when it came out.  There is 100% something that PM on Windows with either Thunderbolt or USB 3.2 ports just fails. It just does.  Like you I had their people remote into my Windows machines and watch and poke around. Ingesting large volumes would result in 25% to 50% of the read cycles on the TB port to just idle. You could (can) see it. It reads a chunk of files... stops.... reads.... stops...  on my Mac... it reads.... and reads... and reads until the ingest is done.

As a sanity check I loaded a card with files and arranged to run a semi-scientific experiment before an NFL game with a few friends. We had two Dell laptops running the current Windows release, a MBP with an M2 as well as a fully maxed out MBP with the M3 (the M4 had not been released yet). My i7 64gb 2tb ssd XPS with TB4 ports took 17 minutes to ingest the test card. The M2 machine took SEVEN minutes and the M3 machine did the ingest in just over 4 minutes. All machines read the same card with the same Thunderbolt reader.   When we were done with the experiment I decided to wait and order the new M4 MBP that was just 3 months away... and have never been happier.  I am 1oooo % convinced that PM simply isn't reading the ports at their native speed for Windows machines.

[Max Lemesh]

sadly I had similar experiences with windows about 15 years ago.
Thankfully I'm on Mac ever since.

Also, nothing to do with photo mechanic, just windows sucking in general )

[ahoward]

We really wanted to get to the bottom of this and see what we could figure out. Kirk and I spent the better part of a few days running tests, adding logging to test builds of Photo Mechanic, tweaking the way that Photo Mechanic fetches data from files, and basically doing everything we could think of to find an explanation or try to improve the experience here, and the best we can tell is that it just comes down to the performance of the exFAT file system on Windows. My test case was an SD card without about 2300 pairs of CR3 and JPEG files (about 90GB). Opening that folder of images on the memory card for the first time and then filtering out any images without a star rating took about a full minute while the card was formatted as exFAT. Formatting the card as NTFS and then copying the same set of files to it and then performing the same test, the filtering operation took maybe 10 seconds. Obviously you don't get the option to use NTFS when you format your memory cards with your camera, but I figured the test was worth mentioning as evidence that the hardware I'm working with is capable of better speeds, but I wanted I still saw the progress of the "Gathering Sort Data" blocking me from operating the contact sheet, but it was significantly faster.  Next, I took the card (formatted as exFAT) and performed the same tests on my Mac. Filtering that same set of images, on the same card, with the same card reader, using the same USB cable with the same (Apple-branded) USB to USB-C adapter again took about 10 seconds.

I'm not saying that you should go out and by a Mac, I absolutely understand the arguments for not wanting one, but we're not giving some kind of preferential treatment to the Mac version of Photo Mechanic here, and exFAT was created by Microsoft, so we have no explanation why its performance would be so much worse. We want Photo Mechanic to be fast for everyone, but we've exhausted all options for investigating this issue, and we're sorry if that means Photo Mechanic is no longer useful for the way that you are trying to use it.