Just a short note on my initial experience of Photo Mechanic. During the weekend I took photos at a sports event and came home with 2500+ photos, which was less than I had expected.
Before the weekend I had watched a few tutorials on how to use Photo Mechanic, I also launched it and tried on a couple of images. So when I pointed PM to the photos I had no real experience of how to use it but I knew the basics.
And … wow, PM is fast, really fast. The culling that usually takes several evenings (I actually have a similar number of photos from last years event that I haven’t culled yet!) was done in about 2 hours. I didn’t use all the features and only basic keywording so I expect things to improve even more.
Only the speed improvement makes PM worth it for me, but I expect that keywording will be another important part when I’ve learned more about how PM works.
So the verdict so far is: if you come home with 20 photos PM probably isn’t worth it … but if you have 2000+ images it could save you a lot of time.