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Whether an app displays content of subfolders or not, should be configurable by the user imo.

Current Lightroom Classic has a menu item for it, alternatively, a setting/preference switch could be used.

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Just to jump on Joju’s side here, I have been looking for an old picture some days ago, I opened my old 2010 macbook that I’ve not been using for over a year, started Aperture, it opened right away (a library with 40 thousand pictures), all pictures were visible right away, I could switch between them without any perceivable lag, and editing was also smooth. Such a nice experience and world’s apart from Photolab. And that is on a 2010 MacBook (not pro), I only added a SSD instead of the hard disk. For me it is a mystery why today’s Software is so slow, I see no excuses for that.

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@Stenis you can easily write 10 pages more and I would still not understand your concept of managing and finding your pictures. That also depends in monster posts (I just measured your last one, nearly 90 cm long). I respect you’re taking time for them, but (now I’m taking a professional point of view, can’t help) are not easy to read and often jump from one subject to the other like:

In my paragraph 2 I didn’t speak about the searching in PhotoLab specifically:

And NO, your beloved PhotoLab isn’t capable to find projects by name - but since you don’t use that part of it, how could you know?

To me and in my way to structure physical folders and virtual components of DAMs (not worth being called that way (C1 also can’t find it’s own projects, groups, albums and intelligent albums as I stated hundred times)) your idea is as far from mine like the other side of the South Pole. And your way works for you and mine is working for me. So it’s better to keep it that way, we don’t have to agree or do it exactly the same way. I’m glad you found a good way for you.

I’m sorry if you felt attacked by my comments about age. But “last ⅓ of life” and “flexible thinking” are not the first choice of connecting sentences together and I am no exception of becoming seriously annoyed by modern developments. Some stuff I saw failing too often to believe in it’s success, and @maderafunk the sizes of apps are becoming bigger and bigger and the knowledge to program a performing app and design a user-friendly interface are becoming smaller and smaller. What I still don’t get, if it was possible 15 years ago to come up with an app like Aperture (which had fans and opponents at it’s time) why has that knowledge gone lost?

About the quoting:
Mark the sentence you want to quote.
The forum software gives you a quote button on top of the text.
Click the “quote” and you’re done.
Quote appears in the editor and you can type along.

Now I was curious about app-size. I made a screenshot of all apps and extracted the photo-apps (btw. Aperture had 1.01 GB 2014)

I was not expecting Affinity as such a memory hog :flushed:
But Photolab also takes 2 GB with all it’s (redundant?) packages
Apple “Photos” to be 40 MB? Who on Earth would believe that, there’s some kind of trick behind :hushed:
Iridient at 70 MB as a RAW developer which is neither beautiful nor can do a lot - just RAW conversions and mostly a new version of it comes out before all the big animals deliver theirs.
Sigma PhotoPro as the always lamest of all converters, at least doesn’t waste a lot of diskspace.

Add the following small RAW converters for Mac.

  • dcraw: 435 kB
  • Apple Photos: 63 MB
  • RAW Power: 77 MB
  • Canon DPP: 298 MB

I don’t say that functionalities are equal in these apps. But they convert RAW files, like the one shown, as seen in RAW Power_

Acros B&W emulation and Levels tool used.
Nice mix of tools in RAW Power imo.

RAWpower is in my list :wink: and Apple photos as well. Why did you get 23 MB more from Apple? Boooohooo :sob:

:slightly_smiling_face:

So, there still are loads of alternatives and I didn’t even mention darktable.

Universal app? :exploding_head:

@Waveuk,
Welcome to PL. DxO has been grabbing customers from Capture One for years. We are happy to have you, but you’ll have to buy it like the rest of us did. There is a loyalty discount for upgrades, but your choosing to leave an inferior product doesn’t qualify for any discount. Don’t worry, you won’t regret the choice to switch.

Bold statement with not much substance as long as you don’t know how he uses C1 and what is the most important part for him. But then, the initial question was “how can I pay less for the same “value”?” :grin:

I also don’t regret the switch to PL, but switched back until getting long enough annoyed of what I need and PL can’t/don’t want deliver. But it’s always good to know more than one app.

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Should and should?

I don´t see the need for that really personally, but others might. There are other solutions to the problem too. Please explain why the Lightroom feature is useful.

I don´t do any metadata related work at Photolab at all. I use the IPTC-info in Photolab just to make sure I haven´t missed to get metadata on my RAW and especially the Virtual Copies. Sometimes I even use it for searching and checking where Photolab found the search hit (filename, folder name, IPTC etc.)

In PM Plus the index topfolder or any of the main folders shows me everything beneath and if I just want to see the RAW it´s just to click on that subfolder and clicking on another might give mee my 4K JPEGS. But this might just be a matter of taste since they also can be filtered. In PM there is also a menu item called “Combined Image”. If that is selected it displays RAW+JPEG side by side of the same motif. If you enlarge the image below you will see JPEG-master and JPEG-derivates and RAW and JPEG-derivates of the same motif side by side.

In PM there are both Collections, Filters, Folder Structure Browsing on virtual folder structures and full text searches in tons of different fields using strings of your liking or bolean operators of all sorts. So there is everything I need to explore catalogs whether a do it in one catalog at the time or over as many as I like to have indexed. If I need to explore data vertically I use the “Browsing” over the Session folders i have from many projects or trips like “Barbados 2013” or “Marrakesh 2018”. If I on the other hand is looking for some horisontal info that spans over the entire database or databases using keywords I might write “Keywords Boat” or “Keyword=Boat” both works.

There also a lot of pre-brewed search tools like:

Tagged
Rotated
Cropped
Tranferred
Photos with GPS
Rating
RAW-images
Missing (broken links or images on mobile discs for example)

I´m sure there are plenty of reasons to use Lightroom for the people who does it but it never appealed to me because of the poor metadata maintenance productivity.

In the example above the speed difference is about three times and then we haven’t at all seen a discussion about the real productivity tools for the maintenance PM has and the common RAW-converters lack.

Photo Mechanic Review – Is It the Best Software for Photo Culling? (fixthephoto.com)

This isn´t an old comparison - it´s made just a few days ago

PHOTO MECHANIC REVIEW

By Tata Rossi 17 days ago, (which should have been on the 27th of november 2022.

I don´t personally need any Projects in Photolab at all. If I want to, I can always use the Collections and Filters in PM. It really has all I need when it comes to displaying, organising, searching and maintaining metadata but I absolutely prefer Photolabs PhotoLibrary before the solution in C1 that I think is absolutely hopeless to use for metadata management.

I usually use the quoting tech you wrote about but that couldn´t be used here because I had to quote a double quote (mine first and your answer and then my answer on that. If I had skipped the first quote the following comment had been impossible to understand because the first level should have been gone. Difficult to understand what your comment was based on.

Speaking about age, it many times has stricken me as a senior developer working also earlier in i billion dollar distribution company for long time (15 years), building business systems for handling product info, prices and rebate handling that I was a lot more open and flexible for change than a lot of my younger work-friends were and that was the case for other more “grown up” IT-folks on our IT-department to. Maybe because flexibility, curiosity and the drive to seek solutions on the problems we were facing was a must if we were going to succeed in integrating these systems in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, with a lot more differences in culture than many living outside of the Nordic Region might believe. So, when it comes to technology, I don´t think my mind has stiffened all that much yet. I´m still curious and very interested in learning new things and I started my own metadata-projects just a couple of years ago and are constantly looking for ways to improve my workflows.

What made me a little bit confused was that you seemed to pay so much attention to if you found an application like PM “ugly” or how it was you expressed it. That was your comment when we were among other things discussing productivity in metadata workflows. That made me lose focus a bit.

Below you have a link to an interesting article about Scott Kelby looking for means to improve his sports photo workflow. Here you also can read about content sources that can make a very big difference for sports photography professionals.

My Sports Photography Workflow (so far) - Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider

Since I´m always open for new interesting ideas around metadata management I found your story about other softwares you have used that could automate keyword tagging interesting because that is one of the paths we can expect will develop further with more and more sophisticated AI. Even culling has a potential to be time consuming even with a tool like Photo Mechanic. AI can automate even part of those tasks to a certain extent. AI Photo Culling sounds like a new bird to watch too. So, I have started to look into the application “FilterPixel” which is supposed to improve the workflows where PM more or less is manual today but PM is not totally manual because it has the possibility to fill in data with the help of variables.

I fill in the Description/Caption-field with PM’s Template with variables like:

{location}

Cornfields in the village of FĂśne

{event}

The text in that filed will look like below since the variables picks the data from the “Event”- and “Location”- Fields in the metadata section “Event and Location” so the text will look like this when it´s ready:

Färila/Ljusdal area Hälsingland Sweden 2017

Cornfields in the village of FĂśne

The trip to Färila/Ljusdal area in Hälsingland 2017

An application like FilterPixel might be of great help with flat keywords and culling but I also see problems and limitations when comparing it to what I do and I´m pretty sure the people using hierarchic keywords will hate FilterPixel contaminating their type of keywords. I´m not at all sure either I will get all that happy with what it puts into PM´s Keywords-field of several reasons. I´m sure there will be quite a lot of garbage I don´t like to have there. The keywords might get there automatic into the Keywords-field but the keyword list in PM will not be updated automatically and that will definitely be a show stopper for me.

I don´t either believe on an AI-based item identification only when it comes to filling in the context in the “Description/Caption”-, “Headline”- or “Title/Object”-fields. Even like I already do in PM in these fields when partially updating them automatically with the help of general variables I think I will always have to add the real specifik content that gives the images a real meaning - because very few images are all that obvious in their meaning without a descriptive text and that will continue to be manual, I think to a large extent but I might be wrong in general.

As I saw when they started to digitize the newspaper industry in the late seventies in my country (I was working then converting their printing presses to “direct litho” in order to be able to use offset sheets. The Unions feared that the technical quality of the papers would decline (and it did) but as in many situations when quality is put against costs, the cost sides use to win and that might even be the case when they start to automate even more of the metadata management because nobody is willing to pay the price the higher quality costs.

Pros and Cons of Using Photo Mechanic - FilterPixel

… and Joachim, I´m pretty sure you know that Photolab isn´t my “bellowed” RAW-converter at all but yours seems to still be Aperture :slight_smile: Maybe you have to be a little bit braver than clinging to your old “dead end”-application Aperture till the bitter end, even if I understand that you are very fond of the fact that it´s not as ugly as PM. Maybe you shall take FilterPixel for a test ride you too.

Double quotes are possible. Triple quotes I don’t know. However, I struggled to understand what you made out of it. Never mind.

I really hope, you didn’t read my reply as inviation to collect test reports about PM and various other metadata add-ons. It’s very simple @Stenis: I don’t believe the time consuming tagging will ever pay off in reduced times to find a certain picture. For me, that is, and for you it’s a different story.

You said, you want others be able to find your pictures in the net. I have no statistics about that but it appears to me, everybody is busy sending new pictures into the world. Millions of “content producers” for how many hundreds viewers? Except the sender is celebrity for whatever reason. As I said, I have no insights about production, emission and consumption of pics made by smartphones but the daily numbers are astronomically. That aside, I’m not “producing” images so others can find them, usually I address few friends about a new web-gallery and that’s it. I prefer feedback from people I like and know. I don’t need to photograph to earn money and for my needs, my system is far better than yours, though not perfect.

I can’t know how open you were in your professional life, but here in this forum you stick like glue to the PM/PL combination which is fine if it works for you, but I never catched you dipping your toe into the waters of asset management by linked files and meta-structure (? is there such a word?). I see your folder-tree and just think “and what is he photographing between Båtsemester and Barbados?” Maybe it’s from the time of negative envelopes, that I numbered the sheet and put the date on it and on another sheet of paper I scribbled few words about its content. There were occasions with 15-20 films (MF, so only 15exp/film) a day and sometimes one in five weeks. So, I want to group my pictures into projects to get context and also chronological order if necessary or if I used different cameras with different file naming. And some projects are running for longer and contain pictures used in other projects.

For you it appears to be very important which assets you already edited - of course, because PM can’t show the RAW edits, only their exports. For me, that would be two intelligent albums: “Adjusted” = “True” or “False”. Same for “Exported”. And that leads to 33.7k files in total of which 17k are adjusted and only 7.4k became exported. But all 17k adjusted images are visible anytime without exporting, without browsing through different indexes. In my system, not in yours. You have to use energy to process them, to sort them, to organize them in different folders - if it makes you happy, why not.

As for keywords: I once (this September, I just saw) made a keyword library for my needs, about 900 entries. It was interesting to create and boring to use. Few of them I still use after I made a new intelligent album to collect them, like “wide-angle top down” which became an accidental project out of few shutter releases by error and afterwards seeing “oh, that looks interesting” especially when seen together.

I think your scheme follows and respects the way you’re taking pictures - and would be the wrong one for me. I would get upset using it because of it’s “inflexibility” (which you now will try to prove as “very flexible”, but you don’t get what I mean: you first need to compose a system of search conditions). I dislike the “concrete structure” of fixed folder names which disobeys the potential of using images from Barbados in a fish-project or a flower catalog. I consider you’re trapped in your structures and I guess you absolutely don’t feel that way - good for you. So, your freedom of not being trapped are your keywords and multiple-app workaround landscape, and my freedom is a simple structure by date in the file register and a catalog overlay only containing links. In one app.

And please @Stenis, don’t start patronizing like

I decide how I organize my pictures. And I decide not to drown in a clutter of additional apps, that’s for you workarounders. It has nothing to do with bravery to try a stupid way leading to a dead end. And speaking of bravery, let’s talk a bit about the use of projects, shall we? Your answer is predictable,

Not brave enough, Stenis? :laughing:

About the ugliness of PM: If a company tries so hard to maintain a Windows 3.11 layout, that’s one hint, if I can’t recognize what’s the base of your search result it’s the next. But apparently you need to know if the picture was taken with shutter or aperture priority. No time for ratings, though. As colour tags brown and black, how innovative. These are typical windows colours, from two decades ago. :nauseated_face: my eyes hate me for what they have to see.

After that sentence you quoted somebody, without naming the author. Never mind. I’m no photographer processing thousands of images each day and I consider these one maybe should learn when to push the button, instead of spraying and praying. The while quote is a pile of rubbish from PM’s marketing department, I think.

@platypus

What you think is a weakness with PL lacking an import function, I think is a strength when using it together with PM Plus.

You wrote: That PL did not “Provide means to automatically keep the database consistent”.

I don´t know what you mean by that really. If I delete an image in the filesystem via the contact sheet interface in Photo Mechanic and then checks what has happened in Photolab that image is gone there too.

… and as I have written before metadata changes done in PM Plus will instantly show up in Photolab if PL is open simultaneously with PM Plus regardless it it´s in an XMP-sidecar or is embedded in XMP-compatible files like DNG, TIFF and JPEG.

Is PL not open in parallell with PM Plus the metadata will get synched the next time PL opens the folder where the updated files reside.

All you need to do is to activate the “synch”. Infact this works really well and I feel I can trust this system to 100% as long as I keep it simple and use a flat keyword model.

I saw a bit old video with a pretty well known guy called Carl Siebert that is quite oriented in metadata matters. When he tested C1 version 12. It was released about 4 years ago and then C1 could not “reread” metadata from JPEG, DNG or TIFF. You could get it imported at the initial corversion but not later from what I understand. Hope that is fixed now with the “synch” functions. Maybe somebody can check that.

It´s nice to have a backup function but I don´t want have like in some softwares that a modal windows pos up every time I finish my converter. I wonder also if many that have a backup programme would prefer to handle the backup there instead.

I´m not publishing images without a context but illustrated stories of different sorts. It´s difficult and expensive to have exhibitions so I think the metadata is crucial then. I also write the XMP in English despite the stories mostly are in my language but that isn´t a big deal today since Google Translate exists. I have had a dialogue with a few and it has happened that a guy in the States that was writing a book found my images from the communist coup 1978. I have some a bit unique historical images from Afghanistan and Uganda (after the Bush War) since there were no mobile cameras then.

I started to publish about three years ago and up to day 71 133 has read about 35 illustrated blog stories. The most read has been read 4136 times and is about protest about the demolition of old blocks in SÜdermalm Stockholm in the nineteen eighties. The second most read are about The Marxist-Leninist Ethiopia 1986 - a politically, culturally and military raped country. Sixteen has been read more than 2000 times and six more than 3000 times. So, I´m quite happy even if I don´t reach millions. How many comes to a photo exhibition in a private gallery and what would that cost? My yearly cost for this is 30 U$. I´m happy with that. I also have some special relation with my relatives in the US that emigrated from Sweden hundred years ago and people in a very transformed village in Israel where I lived almost one year. I plan to publish two new blogs in English for them this winter.

This also motivates me to add metadata to my images.

… and of course, your system is far better than mine - for you. I would have been surprised if it wasn´t. :slight_smile:

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The image folders in that three have no specifik order except that they are ordered from A to Ö which is the last character in my language. I have 25 000 images today that are developed. They are taken between 1972 up to today. Many of them are repro photographed color slides from a lot of long trips I made to Asia or Afrika between 1972 to 1986. I was a back packer for 15 years.

The reason I have to have a very effective DAM-system to handle my 70 000 images is that I have no chans at all to "remember where in this structure a certain image is. That would be imposible. … you assumed I had this amount of images because I use to “spray and pray” :-). No nothing could be more wrong. No one could afford a technique like that in the analog days because film was too expensive and I had a lot with me because just one trip could last three months to half a year so I was very careful when using it. Today I don´t need to behave like a DSLR-photographer since my mirrorless cameras since ten years back (NEX 7 and Sony A7r) where accurate because they had a contrast-AF with feedback and today my A7 IV hardly never misses. I rarely take more than shots still today because I know the focus will be there which you never knew with super stupid phase detecting-AF in DSLR-kameras.

The reason I have 70 000 images of maybe 35 000: - different motifs are that I got my first Zeiss Icon Continue of my father 1963 when I was 13. In februari it is precisely 60 years ago. If you divide 35 000 with 60 you will get 580 images per year. That´s 16 rolls of 36 images films per year. When I went for a long trip I could have between 20 and 25 rolls. If we look at it that way, I think even you can see there is nothing exceptional with that.

As you can see below, most of my different projects so far have been various trips I have done over the years. What the PM index provides is both an index over this file and folder structure but it also offers a fantastic palette of resources like premade filters. You keep track of what cameras you have used for certain projects and there is premade filters both for cameras and used lenses as well as how they have been set when taking these images (only digital cameras though).

You made a laugh of me displaying mode settings like A or S-mode in a contact chart view in PM and that might be fine but what you didn´t know was that was a remnant of an example of “what not to do” I gave some users here that was looking for a method to put that kind of data and also the original file name in the “Keywords” -field. There is just no need for that since an application can handle that with built in “variables”. There are about 260 different EXIF-variables covered in my A7 IV files and about 100 of them are there in PM Plus variable list which gives a user a tremendously powerful, effective and flexible tool to use. Compared to that both C1 and Photolab are very simple, inflexible, unefficient and archaic when it comes to the metadata tools…

This is why you should not add camera- or lens-models in the file- or folder names or terrible thought in the Keywords-field. A structure built by dated folders (capture time or data) are just a lot of unnecessary work too because even that is there. That is much better to handle in a smarter way in a tool like PM. Just as an example. Infact you can slice the data I have any way I like horizontally and vertically using al that metadata and that is especially useful when working with different themes. I for example use to mark all portraits or images with people with the Keyword “FacesImet” because I plan to make an illustrated story over all faces of all the people I have met over all years. The value of an image archive grows with every line of metadata I add.

Just a couple of examples, even if I know that you already think you have a much better system than the one Camera Bits have spent more than 20 years to fine tune after their very demanding sports- and event- photographers wishes.

No one using PM needs to lift a finger to make search filtering lists like the above available for the user

Oooh, @Stenis again a huge pile of text (would you like to suffocate me?) with misunderstandings from your side (I NEVER said or implied, you’re spraying and praying, you just read that superficially).

That’s what I said. Where do you read “Stenis, you’re sparing and praying”? I’m not very patient to persons ripping my text out of context and conclude wildly. But I know you didn’t mean it bad, you were maybe just too busy to compose your reply…

And I read a very nice description of what you do with your photos and why it’s important for you to tag them properly. Waw! Thank you for that.

As for the rest, I think it’s better to keep it the way, you’re doing your thing and I’m doing mine and remain happy and time-efficient. I wanted to show you something about C1’s “token” (so, I can fill into each export’s filename things like aperture, GPS, unbelievable loads of stuff and I maybe used it once or twice)


Same goes for folder names by import. The tokens can come in handy, PL doesn’t have them, I think.

But the next thing you would have laughed your head off: Maybe you discovered the little toolbar “filter” in C1? Works sort of the same as in PL or PM (just only showing the number of images, not the percentage within the library).

And while PL shows me “You have 6435 images taken with f/5.6. But I will display only 1000…”, C1 is different. If I use the search field and type “f/5.6”, 1405 images appear in the browser. And the number next to the filter switch tells me, 3492 images have a different f/5.6. I love it, when apps are brave enough to show how wrong they can be.

Edit+ Addendum: Excire finds in the same structure 5582 images taken with f/5.6 if I open the older C1 catalog and add it’s 1515 images taken with f/5.6 (=6412), I’m approaching the PLM value. Except… PL had no full access to the C1 archive.

@JoJu and @Waveuk
I just have to agree to what Joakim wrote and I don´t see why anyone should migrate from Capture One now that has bought a full version of version 23 or an upgrade of it. Absolutely nothing has changed. You will also get upgrades for free a whole year to come. People with older perpetual licences will not be affected either. Why this panic?? Your license will never expire. You can use it as long as you will be able to install it with the OS you have got and use it.

As a general opinion, I don´t think there is anything better than C1 today when it comes to the features technical sophistication and precision. Nothing what I have seen beat the detail that converter can deliver either. Don´t we need a better reason than a changed licensing model that might not even affect you at all now. The only reason to change I can come up with is if your current version isn´t supporting your new cameras file format or that you have decided to use a thirdparty product as your photo DAM but it depends what kind of product that is because there might be compatibility issues to be aware of regardless of what you chose.

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@JoJu
Sorry if I misunderstood you. I have no intention to deliberately misunderstand you and attack you by misusing a mening you don´t have.

Joachim I use to use the “tokens” in C1 especially when using the export module when I use it for tethering and I love them too. As I have said before, it´s a fantastic product even if I´m not especially impressed by the “DAM” but I think why I seem to have this problem with all integrated DAM-systems in converters. I think I feel quite uncomfortable with them because I´m used to now with an applikation completely occupied with metadata maintenance with “full screen”-forms etc and have to face applications who are not.

C1 is very fast these days (ver 23) and the filtering is useful too. It´s even really fast when conducting the initial indexing. I found it has a much bigger footprint though than PM (several times bigger) and it might be because of the bigger previous PM doesn´t need to have since it´s no converter. When I deleted the C1 catalog I freedalmost 100 GB.

I´m a little bit sorry to have found that Photolab integrates much better with PM than C1 does of various reasons. My honest plan was to abandon PL completely because I found that the layer and masking-functions are just so much better in C1 than in PL, but you can´t get i all. I will continue to use C1 for tethering and the more demanding postprocessing jobs but PL as my main converter and use PM as my Photo DAM.

I think it was a pity you just passed Scott Kelbys article about his sports photo workflow. Because that was really the article that convinced me to get it. Kelby is not “any of these all Internet reviewers”, I think. For me is he the Lightroom guru above all. He wrote quite a few manuals about Lightroom that I studied a lot. So I don´t consider him as especially “biased” when describing his Photo Mechanic workflow. It´s based on both his own experiences and the fact that seemingly all sports journalist in the US at least is using it. I would have expected a few other products used in events like that.

**Scott Kelby: **
" I don’t use Lightroom. Or the Bridge. Ever.
I’ve tried both. It’s a death-trap for pro sports photography. Every pro sports shooter at an NFL game (or otherwise) uses a program called Photo Mechanic (by a company called Camera Bits). If there are 40 photographers in the photo work room, you see 40 copies of Photo Mechanic open on their laptops."

… and PM is not at all for people that just wants to add a few keywords now and then, don´t have especially much data or that don´t want to have to configure software before using it or are outspoken aesthetes that just finds it too ugly and retro to use. :slight_smile:

… and all of you that sits on an image data “silo” with a lot of folders with descriptive labels. You will find that you sit on a very god startingpoint to get up and running in a very short period of time. All you need to do in to put them all in a top folder and index it all. After that you will find that it will be very natural just to open them one by one and batch on common basic data using templates.

My Sports Photography Workflow (so far) - Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider

… or if that doesn´t thrill you at all why not download a more modern AI-driven tool that will "cull your images automatically and add the keywords automatically instead.

6 Reasons Why You Should Use FilterPixel Over Photo Mechanic - FilterPixel

Indeed @Stenis

PM is not only impressively dominant with in sports photography but in news photography overall.
Not as DAM within the news companies and publicists but used by the photographers during culling, tagging and delivery into the DAM system used.

Managing the bizarre amount of inflow if images to the news corp - I used to work at - with it all deep interactions with other systems required a DAM on a whole other level.

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I think, misunderstandings have happened on both sides @Stenis and I didn’t feel purposefully misunderstood, so no worries, all cool. And what I wrote about “masses of images produced daily” has more to do with the purpose of your long term project. I hope, your audience is able to appreciate the gems you’re preparing for them :smiley:

There were not many “historical events” (making it at least into the local newspaper) I witnessed or took part in, so this socio-historical aspect plays no role in my photography. My holidays were just seeing Europe for the first time, or cycling to Brittany or Wales, nice adventures for me, but hardly of interest for anybody today.

Neither am I sports photographer in desperate need to push his pictures into the layout as soon as possible. Otherwise no money comes in, so a tool up to this task is essential. But as I’m not in this role, I have no interest in more basically interesting videos, quicker forgotten than the number of clients at the baker’s this morning. And I still need to learn a couple of other things, professionally and personally - sports reportage is not among it.

“bigger footprint” - maybe because of the masks? PhotoMechanic is around for quite a while (1994), so there is certainly a need for it. I recall some debates about C1+mediaPro or PM vs LR vs AA (AppleAperture), it was interesting how many professionals distrusted Apple. I think, in the beginning Aperture could only store images in a closed catalog. Locked away for people who didn’t know how to look into packages. Even when Aperture opened up to external links of files and to incremental backups of the monstrous .aplibrary - “No, I don’t want to be slave of Apple’s structures. Mine are better, faaaaar better” So many professional photographers acted as arrogant and ignorant as possible, so why not give in and confirm “yes, you professionals were always right, we don’t know anything about your magic workaroundflows, so to frustrate you (and us) no longer we now put our app into the coffin”.

The attitude of some professionals was before hard to withstand for me, but these blockheads were the ones forging the nails to the coffin. No better arguments than “we did it always that way…” Yuk.