Why I Use Photo Mechanic (Part 1)

Screen Shot 2013-11-14 at 10.10.06 PMI was introduced to Lightroom several years ago and I still use Lightroom today. It is my preference for databasing my photographs and doing much of my photo editing and uploading galleries to my website. But something changed recently that introduced new software to my workflow.

I started shooting sports for a local daily newspaper, The Pocono Record. This new endeavor forced me to look at things differently in order to meet the stringent deadlines. One quick example: Friday night high school football games start at 7pm in my area and the deadline for photos to the newspaper is 9:15pm. The game is barely into the 3rd quarter in most cases by this time! Sorting through my photos and picking the ones to submit to the paper requires speed and efficiency.

I heard about Photo Mechanic and some of its speedy features, so I decided to check it out. I perused their website and decided to download a trial copy of the software for a month. After just one photo assignment, I was hooked!

The first reason I use Photo Mechanic is speed. This software doesn’t mess around. It allows me to quickly and efficiently sort through over a thousand images in short order. The speed of uploading my flash cards is much quicker than in Lightroom, and forwarding through image after image to preview them is much quicker, too! In reality, I read about this, but was hesitant to actually believe the hype. It wasn’t until I tried it myself that I realized the hype was right!

I will share my Photo Mechanic workflow in upcoming blog posts, but Part 1 of this series is clear: I use Photo Mechanic because of its speed. It is fast and it is efficient. Give it a try. Compare it to your preferred software and see if it makes any difference to you.