Thanks Kirk, I'm not really enough of a power user to justify the annual fee to myself and now mainly seem to use PM for ingesting and renaming my files.
I'm trying to steer clear of altering the files or using xmp files so I mainly use iView to catalog them.
It's not really an annual fee. For instance your updates period expired seven months ago and yet you're still eligible for version 4.4.x.x updates. We make sure that everyone can have access to the most stable release of the last major version they're entitled to.
When 4.5 comes out you'll still be able to download it, request a demo code, and evaluate it for 20 days. At that point you can decide to purchase another updates license. Because the updates period lasts for a year, it is often the case that users will get two full major upgrades out of a single updates license.
You don't caption your files with metadata? A catalog with no metadata makes for a difficult system to find your files at a later date. Keywording and captioning really helps in this regard and makes it really easy to find specific images in the future. Photo Mechanic excels at captioning and keywording in bulk. Code Replacement during captioning is a real time-saver. And if you don't want to modify your RAW files, then XMP sidecars are an excellent way to go. iView Media Pro works very well with them.
Please do download the 4.4.3.3 update anyway.
-Kirk
