PhotoMechanic made the top in a recent user poll on sportsshooter.com:
http://www.sportsshooter.com/poll.html?results=1&pid=57
Yep. That poll was from December of 2004. I think that for people under tight deadlines (sports photography and photojournalism) Photo Mechanic is still to this day the choice of those photographers.
I was at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit this week (June 28-29, 2006) and I gave a presentation along with folks from Adobe, ACD Systems, Extensis, and iView Multimedia. Each of us were allowed about five minutes to demonstrate our software. I chose to show how Photo Mechanic can be used to get one's photos up to a service very quickly. I ingested a bunch of Hockey photos provided graciously by Mike Sturk and during the Ingest, applied IPTC Stationery, previewed the photos (still while downloading), picked the best single photo, cropped it, captioned it with Code Replacement, and then uploaded it to PhotoShelter. About 1/4 to 1/3 of the audience were Photo Mechanic users, and when the demo was over there was much applause.
Very cool since I was quite nervous speaking about Photo Mechanic in front of 300 of the top photographers and industry insiders, especially when I had to abandon my MacBook running Windows XP under BootCamp (the video projector couldn't handle a digital-only signal) and use a machine I had never used before. But the demo went without a hitch (I even had to borrow a USB card-reader since I only had FireWire readers with me.)
Special thanks go to Mike Sturk for his Hockey photos, John Omvik of Lexar for letting me borrow his USB card reader, and Nick Didlick of Blue Pixel for offering his Windows laptop.
Several people came up to me after the presentation to ask me about Code Replacement since they were amazed at how quickly I was able to caption a photo with relevant information with no spelling errors.
-Kirk
