PHOTO MECHANIC 6 PREVIEW INFO BOX PORTABLE
PHOTO MECHANIC 6 PREVIEW INFO BOX PRO
PHOTO MECHANIC 6 PREVIEW INFO BOX SOFTWARE

Some of those photos were red, indicating that they hadn’t fully loaded yet. In about five seconds, Photo Mechanic Plus created a contact sheet of 110 pictures. Photo Mechanic Plus created a contact sheet of photos in less time than Lightroom could load the photo previews before the import. The Jist: It’s not a photo editor, but photographers can save some time by culling photos before importing them into Lightroom or Capture One. Import: Less than five seconds, or 2:44 to build a catalog with previewsĮxport: N/A, but it takes less than 5 seconds to send to Lightroom or Capture One (after which, you would have to wait for them to upload there).

Finally, I timed an export of 110 JPEGs, original size, quality set at 80, to the same hard drive.

I also looked for any lag time loading individual photos. I timed how long to add the photos to a catalog and generate a standard preview. Instead, we looked at the time it took to copy those 110 photos from the external hard drive to a catalog. The speed of copying photos from an SD card is largely hardware-based. While I’m sharing my experience, times won’t be exact on other machines.

PHOTO MECHANIC 6 PREVIEW INFO BOX PORTABLE

The original files were stored on a portable LaCie external hard drive via USB 3.

PHOTO MECHANIC 6 PREVIEW INFO BOX PRO

These programs were run on a 2015 MacBook Pro running Big Sur with 16 GB of RAM. Speed varies based on several different factors. I did not test the speed of editing tools, which are typically brief enough to be difficult to time accurately. I focused on culling rate: testing importing, building previews, and exporting. To test each photo editor’s speed, I worked with roughly 6 GB of data – 110 RAW files from the Nikon D850. The other four are photo editors with RAW digital asset management built-in: Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, and Luminar 4. Out of those five, one is a photo browser designed only for the culling process without editing tools: Photo Mechanic Plus. I timed five popular culling programs and photo editors. I focused on the importing, culling, and exporting process and briefly looked at the time required to load individual images. Watching photos upload is the photography equivalent to watching paint dry, but timing the process helped illuminate which programs offered the most culling speed. I speed tested several programs to find the fastest photo editors. But, can a specific photo editor speed up the culling process? Importing can take several minutes, even hours, with large uploads.

PHOTO MECHANIC 6 PREVIEW INFO BOX SOFTWARE

Slow software only makes the tedious task worse. When you need to get from shoot to published the fastest, which photo editor excels at culling, importing, and exporting?īetween the shoot and the edit is the cull - the dreaded time spent sitting behind the computer, sifting through photos for keepers.

Photo mechanic 6 preview info box