But you know what? Even though I love me some Adobe Bridge, Photo Mechanic still whips its butt when it comes to speed. Unlike Lightroom and Aperture, Photo Mechanic is not a RAW image converter-it’s just a photo browser that’s more of a direct competitor to Adobe Bridge than anything else. Of course, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. What do I like about this almost cultish photo browser that has similar functionality to the better-known Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge and Apple Aperture? It’s that Photo Mechanic is just flat out fast, letting me open and review an entire library of high-res images (including RAW files) while those other programs are still starting up. One piece of software, however, that I find myself returning to again and again, even though I have other good imaging programs that do sort of the same thing, is Photo Mechanic. It’s gotten to the point where I can tell ten minutes into the user experience whether a program is something I would use on a regular basis or if I should just delete it immediately from my hard drive. With all of the other DAMs coming (including yours?), PM has the opportunity to be the universal front end that feeds imported photos and metadata to a whole range of cataloging and processing apps, both on desktop and mobile.In my line of work, I receive tons of software programs to test out: some of them good, some of them redundant and much of them, unfortunately, total crap. Somebody is going to make this product - there's a market there for the taking, and a growing chorus of people who give Adobe a few bucks a month (at least) but aren't particularly happy with them. I still do my import and metadata editing in PM now, but would really like to move that whole process to the iPad Pro so I can do it anytime/anywhere without carrying a laptop. I think that PM, by its nature, is the obvious product for this role, since you've never been about photo processing - before Lightroom Mobile came along, I did all my flagging in PM before importing to Lightroom (I even set up the shortcut buttons on my Wacom tablet to flag/unflag in PM). The first player that comes up with a mobile product that integrates seamlessly with the desktop (while not necessarily having every feature, especially at initial release - just the removal of particular pain points) and provides a better way of taking the drudgery out of some of the process will get a lot of business. You don't want to emulate the newspaper industry. I'm not averse to subscription for the right capabilities - Adobe's problem is they're using Mobile as part of the subscription carrot, believing that the Desktop apps are the main attraction, much like newspapers gave away web content/ads believing that print was their "real" product. While new photo processing apps have been coming on the scene with startling regularity lately (Luminar, On1 Photo RAW, Topaz Studio), the thing that will really put someone over the top is getting a useful subset of features on iOS for a reasonable price. Just when a bunch of pros settled on LR Mobile for doing fast triaging and rating of photos, Adobe ruined the app interface and took away the fast rating feature (supposedly temporarily, but it's been a month of constant anger from effected pros with no response yet). There is a very ripe market for an app that can do something like PM on iOS, and Adobe can't stop shooting themselves in the foot trying to figure out what Lightroom Mobile is for. After that, the trick is getting the images from the device to the desktop OS - with iOS 11, it could be as simple as a folder in iCloud. I would think you'd be able to rename, apply metadata, etc. You should be able to pull images in from the Camera Roll on the device and resave them in your app sandbox. PM really doesn't need to get images directly from the card in order to be useful.
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