Author Topic: PM vs Bridge  (Read 96303 times)

Offline mikeguil

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PM vs Bridge
« on: June 22, 2006, 08:30:31 PM »
I haven't looked at PM for almost a year - basically since I upgraded to CS2 and found that Bridge did most of what I needed and combined with ACR and PhotoShop, was a virtually seamless workflow.  Now that a few version updates have been released, can anyone give me a comparison between the two?  What does PM do better than Bridge and vice versa?

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: PM vs Bridge
« Reply #1 on: June 22, 2006, 09:07:49 PM »
I haven't looked at PM for almost a year - basically since I upgraded to CS2 and found that Bridge did most of what I needed and combined with ACR and PhotoShop, was a virtually seamless workflow.  Now that a few version updates have been released, can anyone give me a comparison between the two?  What does PM do better than Bridge and vice versa?

I'm not a Bridge expert by any means.  But I can tell you that Photo Mechanic offers the following features that Bridge does not:

Speed.  Photo Mechanic will render thumbnails many times faster than Bridge can.
Ingest.  Photo Mechanic can download your photos, rename them, caption them and make a backup all in one step.
FTP Upload.  Photo Mechanic can upload your images directly to an FTP server.
PhotoShelter Upload.  Photo Mechanic can upload your images to your PhotoShelter account.
Excellent batch renaming.
Excellent IPTC batch captioning, including captioning most RAW file formats.

I'm sure that there are many more things that PM does that Bridge does not, but since you can get a trial version of Photo Mechanic for 20 days, why don't you just try it out for yourself?

-Kirk

Offline roysmyth

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Re: PM vs Bridge
« Reply #2 on: June 23, 2006, 11:19:58 AM »
As a fairly experienced Bridge user, I'll add a few observations.

Photo Mechanic provides a fast, easy way to quickly download a large number of images, add IPTC metadata, caption, select the best shots, and send them to a client or editor. It has been designed with the needs of news and sports photographers in mind. It also seems to have been designed for photographers shooting JPEG, although it has been extended to do a good job of handling metadata with raw files.

If you are doing your own end to end raw digital workflow, what Photo Mechanic will offer is more speed in the first few steps. You will probably be working with the JPEG previews of your raw files. While most metadata work is faster and easier in Photo Mechanic, you may find keywording easier in Bridge because of the way Bridge uses keyword groups.

A serious drawback of using Photo mechanic with Bridge is that any ratings you apply to your photos in Photo Mechanic are not carried over to Bridge.

A general problem with Photo Mechanic is the lack of documentation. Development seems to be driven by user requests and new releases come out at a rapid rate. Unless you are an avid reader of this forum and the feature discussions, it is impossible to keep up with the feature changes. IMHO it would be a better service to users to step back from rapid feature tweaking and provide solid user info and a product roadmap, but many users seem to love the rapid response to new feature requests.


Offline mikeguil

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Re: PM vs Bridge
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2006, 11:27:36 AM »
My workflow is totally RAW and the number of images to process isn't that great.  On average, probably less than 60 per shoot.  I haven't had a problem with speed (G5/Dual 2.0) in Bridge and I do use the rating system extensively, as well as the PhotoShop Batch options from within Bridge (not sure if PM can do this). 

Offline Pavel

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Re: PM vs Bridge
« Reply #4 on: July 08, 2006, 08:36:39 AM »
My workflow is all raw as well but ranges between about 800 and 7000 shots per shoot.  Bridge would drive me insane - and Photomechanic is the best medicine! :)

Bridge is very slow with many files and does not have the flexibility to rename with moves like PM does nor to use variables, which once gotten used to would be impossible to live without now.