Hi!
I have recently been introduced to (and then purchased) Photo Mechanic by a Professional Photographer friend of mine. I am now, however, confused about it’s purposes.
I have been a Photoshop user for a cuppla decades, and have, as you might imagine, a few photos. I used ACDSee for quite a while in my Windows days as a viewer program.
Bridge helped me when it was released, but, while it was good for tagging and metadata, all it could do was show me what was currently on or attached to the computer.
Lightroom helped me organize my shots so I can see what I have on different drives, which is a phenomenal feature, but I don’t really use it as an editor.
Does PM act as a conduit to PS or Lightroom or does it function as a library manager on it’s own? Will I be able to store and see remote libraries without their being attached to the computer or is that a feature exclusive to Lightroom.
Also, when I export to Lightroom, do the newly tagged and rated images go into the library that I've created, or is it necessary to trigger the import function of LR to accomplish that?
I understand about the ingesting, filtering, tagging, and rating features of Photo Mechanic, but to my new eyes, I don’t immediately see what else it does.
If it does have Library management, I will be absolutely delighted. If not, it seems to still have value for it’s ingestion feature.
A lot of questions I know, but if I am to include PM in my workflow I want to understand it before I start ingesting this year's photos, which have yet to be dealt with.
Thank you very much for your input,
marc