Photo Mechanic Plus cataloguing is dead

[syncrasy]

Welcome to the "DAM refugee" community. I became a Media Pro refugee when Phase One killed the app in 2018. I have yet to find a suitable replacement.  (This thread reminds me of the "Where to, now?" thread in the Media Pro / Capture One forum.)

Lightroom, Photo Supreme, NeoFinder, and PM+ have been in my list of potential replacements, and I tried all four years ago, but none could match the elegance and feature set of Media Pro, which I'm still running on a 2010 Mac Pro.

But it's time to revisit my DAM migration strategy again. Photo Supreme and NeoFinder are bubbling up to the top of my list. (Thanks, Carl, for the NeoFinder videos.) Photo Supreme is billed as a more robust DAM than NeoFinder and is cross-platform (Win/Mac), but it has a steeper learning curve.

Has anyone tried Photo Supreme recently?

[carlseibert]

I've tried it twice. Didn't like it either time.  I might take yet nother look.

I don't know how the cross platform issue works out. For the moment, PM+ is working on my Windows machine.

I only once tried the Windows version of NeoFinder and that was a pretty long time ago and only for a very brief look I'll have to look into it more carefully at some point.

-Carl

[george_51]

I too was disappointed with the discontinuation of PM6+ as I never had problems running it on a MacBook.

I used it to curate a library of ship photographs organised in a hierarchy of folders, USA, US Navy, Destroyers, Fletcher Class is an example.

Looked at several alternates, Apple Photos next to useless as cannot deal with a hierarchy, Adobe Bridge works but no thanks etc. other solutions lock you into proprietary files  - as does Lightroom.

Best solution for me is PM6 for organising, tagging,key wording etc.

Neofinder good for searching but not so good at tagging etc and for me the killer - you cannot drag an image from desktop to drop into Neofinder and see the image without a catalogue refresh. I plan to use it for searching only.

Hope this helps.

[30west]

Actually, I also purchased Neofinder based on this discussion but it falls FAR short of being a dedicated photo solution. It IS a very good Search engine that also targets all kinds of other files but lacks (for one example) a depicted list of all keywords with the number of files in each. I have corresponded with the developer and it is clear that the focus of Neofinder is just "different". I see it as basically the macOS Finder on steroids...which is basically implied by its name.

I highly recommend Photo Supreme (Idimager) as a full solution. I have used it for about 3 years along side Photo Mechanic and both have some unique strengths, but Photo Supreme is remarkably complete and provides every feature that I would ever use. It also is less costly and has no limit on the number of machines that can be used with one license (for the same user). Since I have a desktop and more that one generation of Mac laptops, this is extremely more convenient that activating / deactivating licenses to use Photo Mechanic on (say) 3 computers.

I also bemoan the loss of cataloging in PM, but it remains (for the time being) good as a "browser". The new licensing scheme was going to be a killer for me anyway. I purchased a new "perpetual" license as an upgrade when Camera Bits attempted to force subscriptions. Now I am out of my 1 year of updates and have no option but to buy a new full priced license or go subscription. Not happening in my case, but probably makes sense for paid professionals....gary

[30west]

Hi Carl, I have watched your videos on PM+ and also xnView and they are excellent. I just posted my opinion of NeoFinder (a few posts up this thread) and find it entirely inadequate for a photo cataloging app. To begin with, my photo folders were cataloged with an "album" for most of my 500+ keywords, but they are not "smart albums". The developer told me that they look at "CatalogSet" to build these albums on import, which the user manual references as a derivative of  an app named "Iview" (IrfanView?). So I have no idea where this "CatalogSet" lives in metadata and do not see a field named "CatalogSet" in ExifTool, but maybe I am missing it.

I can not find a way to display a list of keywords with associated files and the number contained (all available in PM+. LR, Adobe Bridge, Photo Supreme and even DigiKam). Developer says that this is not available... Yes, one can do a search (each time?) to look at a list of items. The developer says you can edit albums, but I don't see a method to do so in the context menu (apparently he means one can manually add or delete items to these albums) but I guess that means dragging new items into the appropriate "albums" with every new batch of photos. So if one has photos with multiple keywords each (year, place, person  etc) one would have to do a LOT of "dragging".I'm not sure that adding or editing keywords is all that easy either, but I WILL view your videos and perhaps I will find some missing keys to make NeoFinder more useful as a PHOTO cataloging tool. Right now, I think (free) xnViewMP has much more functionality...but maybe I'm wrong. As I said in my previous post, I think Neofinder has use as a macOS Finder on steroids and I have experimented with cataloging archive documents and music files and it seems to do this well.

I am very happy to see you on this thread and hope you will continue to engage...thanks...gary

[30west]

This is the second follow-up to my original post indicating my personal opinion that NeoFinder is NOT a substitute for PM+. As there have been no comments to MY posts, maybe this opinion was unwelcome or an outlier to the herd heading in that direction. I just watched ALL 3 of Carl Seibert's videos on NeoFinder and perhaps now understand that perhaps everyone is under the same premise as Carl that NeoFinder would be used in conjunction WITH basic PM. THAT scenario IMO does make sense because it provides a lot of "search" functionality. As noted in Carl's 3rd video, it is NOT a great vehicle for ingesting or adding initial metadata, nor ideal for editing metadata, although it can be done fairly "kludgy".

PM is and has been the Gold Standard IMO, but has features far beyond my amateur needs, even though it covers the features that I do use. Again, I strongly believe Photo Supreme is a more complete solution if one is not going to stay tied to the now mandatory subscription model of PM (note: I am simply a paid user of PSU - not a shill). My PM+ "perpetual license" continues to work (until it doesn't), but my one year of updates has expired so that I would need to fall on the sword of a subscription (not "gonna" EVER do that), or keep purchasing full one year perpetual licenses if I want updates. At that point, getting sucked back into Lightroom quagmire would be a viable alternative, but not "gonna" do that either. I hope to be able to use PM occasionally for a couple super powerful features that I rarely use ("search and replace"), but it's time to "move on" in my case....gary

[syncrasy]

I highly recommend Photo Supreme (Idimager) as a full solution. I have used it for about 3 years along side Photo Mechanic and both have some unique strengths, but Photo Supreme is remarkably complete and provides every feature that I would ever use.

I appreciate hearing from a Photo Supreme user. I would have jumped from Media Pro to Photo Supreme many years ago if Photo Supreme had a web gallery creation tool. (I'm still using Media Pro's web galleries to create custom portfolio/print ordering web pages. But that could change. Photography is only a side gig, and print sales are so paltry that I'll probably have to rethink my online presence.)

[paul tolenaar]

Isn't there a chance that Photo Mechanic Plus will rise from the dead with OS 27...?

[ahoward]

Isn't there a chance that Photo Mechanic Plus will rise from the dead with OS 27...?

If anything, MacOS 27 will likely introduce new issues. I can't say I've seen any or had any reported from customers on the beta, but we're not testing it too heavily since it is no longer in development.

[vale]

wait! what?
You had a product that people supported with their money. And even if those money kept going (that's a benefit of subscription, right?) you decided that it's not going to work anymore (even if software development it is what we pay for) and give up. In one month a new (already out for some time for developers) OS will hit the market and you tell us that you are NOT EVEN TRYING ?!?!?!?
This is shameless milking.....