Save time culling with Photo Mechanic!

The Lightroom lag is a real struggle for photographers right around the world.

When I first started using Lightroom, I couldn't believe how long it was taking to process all the images from my memory card AND how long it was taking to click through all of them to 'cull'.

'Culling' is the process of getting rid of all the 'dud images' -- the images you don't want to keep.

John and I shoot in 'RAW', which means, when we take a photo, it saves more information than what your average jpeg saves as, allowing us to take those images into Lightroom and have much more freedom in terms of editing -- however, it does mean that our images come out much 'flatter' and more dull than a jpeg.

*Side note: If you shoot in RAW and you wondered why the heck it looks amazing in the back of your camera and then you upload your images onto your computer and find a grey and lifeless image, that's because your camera shows you the jpeg version of your image. When you upload it, you're taking all that RAW information as well, which leaves your image looking.. well.. 'less than average'.*

RAW files take up much more space than a jpeg file does, meaning it takes much longer to upload those images, too.

We'll get into RAW files another day. Today, I'm sharing our secret weapon for speeding that culling process along, allowing me to deliver a gallery within a couple of days! It's called 'Photo Mechanic'.

Created by the US company, 'Camera Bits', who's founder was actually the co-author of the award winning game, Dungeon Master.. NOT 'Dungeon's and Dragons'..

Back on track.

Photo Mechanic is a media browser which gives me the ability to take all my RAW files, sometimes over two-thousand at one time, and view them almost immediately on my computer, before organising, managing and finally, importing them into Lightroom (or any other post-processing program you use.

Let me walk you through it..

When you open Photo Mechanic, you'll see this screen ☝🏼..or, if you already have your memory card/s in their reader and connected to your computer, you may see this screen 👇🏼.

This is the window we use to 'ingest' images from our memory cards to your computer (or external hard drive, whichever setup you're using).

If this window doesn't open upon loading, click on 'File' and then move down to 'Ingest...' in the drop down menu, as shown below.

Once this window opens, you will need to select the memory card you're ingesting from. If you have multiple cards in a multiple bay reader, you can upload all the files from all your cards, at the same time, just select them all. Here, I only have one plugged in and selected, 'EM 32GB'.

At this point, you have the option to rename your entire batch of images, include IPTC credit and keyword information (IPTC is probably more for journalism) and make copies of your files in two different locations. Personally, I don't rename or add keywords or IPTC credit in Photo Mechanic. I rename my files in Lightroom, which is also where I add my keywords and my file copyright which are all imbedded into the exported file once I'm done editing. If you're not already using imbedded keywords to up your SEO game, I suggest you start!

I go ahead and select the folder I want to copy my files to and hit 'Ingest'.

As your images ingest, you'll see them all begin to appear on the screen.

On the left side of the screen, you can see a green square with a loading bar and 'Ingest Complete'. While your ingest is in progress, this square will be yellow. If there's an error or a corrupt card, this square will turn red.

If you have one card ingesting, you will only see one bar. If you have several cards ingesting simultaneously, you will see several bars.

For a single 32GB card (120MB/s UDMA7 compliant), this process usually takes less than a minute.

Here, we begin the cull by double clicking on the first image to enlarge it so we can see it clearly.

I like to start from the last image and work my way to the start. Personal preference. Start wherever suits you.

To rotate your images, select '[' to turn it 90 degrees to the left and ']' to turn it 90 degrees to the right.

My culling process is super simple and straight forward.

In this example, I have photos I took of my son. I select '1' to label an image pink and indicate that this is a keeper.

If I'm editing a wedding or engagement session, I will also decide whether an image will go forward for the blog post by selecting '5' and marking it '5 Star', indicating that this is a favourite image (all my 'favourites' get blogged).

Once I've gone through all my images and selected all the 'keepers', I close the preview window by hitting 'Esc'.

Closing the preview window will bring you back to the main window.

Now, you can see that there are a bunch of images with pink bars and some without; the pink selections being the ones I want to keep, the grey, being the ones I want to trash.

In the bottom right corner, you can see that there's a little rainbow bar. By clicking on grey, we deselect all the images I don't want and am left with a selection of all the images I do want.

At this point, I click on an image and press 'Command' + 'A' (or 'Ctrl' + A on a PC) simultaneously, to select all the images.

Finally, I drag all the images into a pre-prepared folder on my computer, all ready to import to Lightroom and edit.

If I were to import all these images to Lightroom, without culling in Photo Mechanic, I would be waiting for a long time just for the import, then another long while for 'Smart Previews' to build.

Even if I were to cull in Lightroom, prior to importing, after you've clicked through a handful of images, it begins to really lag! Sometimes, I can scroll through the grid and avoid serious lag, but it's near impossible to know if an image is a keeper or not, just by looking at thumbnails. I need to see them enlarged.

Once you double click that thumbnail and begin selecting images and clicking through, that's when you're hit with lag and it can take hours to cull an entire wedding this way -- or even an engagement session!

The other awesome bonus with Photo Mechanic is that you can also live ingest if you're shooting tethered, which is always helpful when you're shooting something which needs to be viewed fairly quickly to ensure you have the shot you need, or you're working with other businesses or creatives and your work needs to be approved by others.

There are so many things I love about this program! Photo Mechanic offer a one month free trial and then it's around $200AUD, one time payment. THAT'S IT! We get no kick-backs from Photo Mechanic or Camera Bits, and we paid for our subscription.. so we get nothing out of sharing them with you! We just really love how it's changed things for us, in terms of how quickly we can cull images and then move them into Lightroom to begin editing.

And I couldn't leave you without sharing the edited images from that example!