I upgraded my computer from PhotoMechanic to PhotoMechanic Plus which includes DAM. It allows a person to use either of the systems you mentioned, and by using KEYWORDS in the catalog, once I get that done, I’ll be able to search in a similar manner to what I did in Lightroom.
When I added dates to the filename, I used to ue Month-Day-Year. One of the videos I watched suggested I change to “YYYYMMDD | the next words identify the loation or person”. For example if I posted a photo of Bob Edwards at home, I might make the filename:
1920-11-25 | bob edwards home
The beauty of doing this is the straight line character “|” will all be one over another in the display, and the directory will be nicely organized by date. If I can find that video again, I’ll post it here.
To use this, all I need to do is put the memory card in my computer. PhotoMechanic starts, renames my photos and folders, and takes some of the data from the “template” I fill out before I do the ingest.
Sorting helps best if it leads you from rough to fine. Therefore you’d want the date prefix to be YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY_MM_DD etc. On the other hand, if you more easily remember that you shot something in, say, May, your original date prefix is fine.
The pipe sign helps recognize the parts of the filename - only if the list of items is displayed with a non-proportional type. Finder types have changed in newer versions of macOS and list view uses a proportional type
This topic is the most appropriate one I could find to ask the following.
Let’s pretend my directory path in macOS to get to my images is:
Pictures > PL4 > USA > Miami > …and all my image folders reside within .
Let’s say I want to rename the folder currently with a file name of PL4 to --PL4–
(actually, I use an underscore, not a dash, but I don’t know how to type an underscore character in this forum so it shows up properly.)
(Meaning I’m changing the name of the top-level folder in my Apple’s “Pictures” folder.)
If I exit PL4, and as you so nicely put it, do the rename whilst PL’s back is turned, will it work?
When I next open PL4, will it instantly pick up on the change, and everything will work normally?
Or, will PL4 squad its displeasure at me and tell me it’s lost.
And since I’m asking this, would PL4 react the same way, were I to move the folder structure to an external drive?I have no plans to do that right now, but my iMac drive is down to only 128 GB free space. Sometime this year I’ll need to deal with that.
Questions are always welcome but consider that those of us who can answer these types of questions generally can do so because we’ve tried them out ourselves. As a result I suggest that you consider experimenting with your various scenarios and let us know what you find out.
The key question for you is, do you use PL to manage projects, keywords or the history list?
If the answer is yes, by moving files outside of PL, or any other DAM, you will “screw things up”.
If no then, from PL’s point of view, all you really have to do is ensure that you are using .dop files for saving edits because; if not, all your work will only be saved to the database and you will break the connections between the image files and their edits. You can check if you are using .dop files by looking in the Preferences…
Provided you are not managing projects, keywords or want to persist the history list between sessions, and providing you are using .dop files, you can then delete the PL database, and possibly the cache, after the move but before reopening PL.
I don’t know anything yet about PL4 managing “projects”, whatever that means.
Keywords are something I have yet to learn, and I believe that will be handled by PhotoMechanic Plus.
As to the “history list”, is that kept in the “.dop” file, or in PL4’s database?
I’m not going to mess around with any of this on my iMac. I was given a MacBook Pro, that eventually will be given to the eye hospital I volunteer at, in India. For now, it’s running on a different location. So, what I will do is install a demo copy of PL4, and upload some photos into a new folder inside the Pictures folder. Maybe I’ll call that folder TEST. After using it for a while, I will rename that folder “TEST-X” or something similar.
Until now, I thought I would do this while PL4 was closed. Is it possible to do this from within PL4, sort of like the way I used to do it in Lightroom? Since the main goal of this is to keep PL4 happy, this sounds like the most logical choice - if PL4 allows me to rename folders.
Projects are a way of collating references to files from anywhere in your library, regardless of their original folder, so that you can work on a bunch of connected file (a project) without having to keep changing folders. And you’re obviously not working with projects, which means you don’t care if the PL database is deleted.
As you mention, you are wanting to use PhotoMechanic Plus for keywords, so you don’t need the PL database for those.
I personally don’t use the history list because I don’t care in which order I made changes. If something needs changing, I just go to that tool and change it again. The history list is kept in the database between editing sessions but, if you are not bothered about that, you don’t need the PL database for those either.
Yes, that’s what I meant and, as you have them set, you are using .dop files for saving edits.
All this adds up to the fact that you can delete the PL database at anytime and PL will recreate it for you automatically because PL uses it as a sort of working cache to speed some operations up.
Because moving files outside of PL can cause conflicts with the database, because you don’t need the database, you can simply delete it after having moved your files and PL will recreate all it needs from scratch with the new locations.
Oops, one more mistake on my part. So, in the “history” list, I can go to something I did 20 steps ago, and only that one thing will get changed, and the 19 things I did after that will remain???
In Lightroom, if I do that, everything since that change is ignored - I think.
Regardless of Lightroom, it is wonderful to know that anything in the history list can be modified, without having an effect on all the other things I did. That’s good to know.
OK, please confirm - if in step 25 I made something brighter, and I’m now on step 50, if I go to the history list and modify step 25, steps 26 through 30 are lost. So, suppose I wanted to change the setting to a lower brightness - and knowing that I’ve used this same tool for many other purposes, how do I “un-do” some single specific change I had done earlier? I think you are telling me to go back to the same tool, and somehow find that one specific time I over-did it, and change that single correction.
Until now, I would have thought to go back to that change in my history list, revise it, and then need to do all the following changes all over again.
Ignore the history for the moment, go to the respective tool and adjust your image. This is what @Joanna and every other sane being would do.
Then again, if you click on step 25 and change brightness, steps 26 to 50 will be lost and gone forever, even “undo” (ctrl-z) is helpless. Change the past and the present as you know it will be lost. Changing the history is like time travel. But when you edit an image, time (as laid down in the history) does not matter.
I might not be one of those “sane beings”. When things are all confusabobbled, I sometimes want to go back to the beginning and start all over again. …and when that happens, it’s a lot easier for me to get to what I want.
(Before you think I’m totally nuts, doing it this way helps me learn better than fiddling around with something I’m already frustrated with. Because of this forum, I find myself editing things that I might otherwise ignore, as I learn from doing so, and I learn even more from the feedback. When people here send me a “.dop” file, I try to understand what they did, and why, then do what I just wrote - start all over again at the beginning. Knowing what one of you did to get something to work isn’t enough - I need to try to be able to do it on my own. )
Learning by trying and doing is exactly what I do. No need to be afraid of what others might think!
And sometimes, I resort to the manual: get access to it from DPL’s help menu because it can help to also build the know-why.
If you come across an image that looks good to you, create a new preset (to see if it might work on other images too) and then keep pushing sliders and bending tone curves etc. go wild and crazy and see what works (for you and you alone) and what does not - no need to ask for someone’s permission - unless you work for a client who wants the sky to be greener…
