I’ve heard about Photo Mechanic before, and that for example wedding and sports photographers use to quickly go through a large number of photos. Well, I’ve always huffed and puffed thinking that it’s silly to have one program just for this: “I can do that in Lightroom, why bother with another program???”
However … there is a slight problem, it has now been about 1 year since my son & friends graduated to 3rd Dan in Ju-Jutsu Kai (third degree black belt) and I haven’t still gone through the photos and picked which to process further.
I started going through them on my desktop but I never managed to get through the photos, I then synced them so I could use my iPad and while I’ve made some progress I’m still only at 1/2 - 2/3 somewhere. What has been the problem? Simply that it takes too much time, I can’t really put my finger on why it’s so difficult for me to do this but it is.
Well, during the weekend of 30 November - 1 December I’m going to photograph three other graduations. I expect that I’ll get back home with some 5000-8000 photos, not a huge amount but at least significant. The problem is that I only have about 8 days to whittle this down to about 50 photos. I’m not aiming to produce the final “albums” for the three graduations, for the albums I’m aiming at 100 photos for each graduation, but I need to come up with 50 finished photos in 8 days. The 8 days are a hard limit since I’m in for eye surgery on day 9, so while I’m aiming for a couple of days (hey, I’m working also) 8 days is the absolute maximum.
My experience tells me that this is going to be difficult to do in Lightroom, so what better time to test out if Photo Mechanic is as good as people says. I’ve downloaded the demo and is going to spend the weekend figuring out how it work. And then it’s time for the real test.