Photo Mechanic vs LR

[Kelly Greer]

Hi Brian!

I'm using the free trial of photo mechanic and LOVE IT.  Tried Nikon view thingy and it was beyond glitchy.  On1's raw viewer was as slow as ACR.  I subscribe to Adobe CC - so I was wondering if LR is as fast as photo mechanic JUST for culling/ viewing 100%/ rating?  Or does the importing time completely negate any speed you get?  Just seeing if I could use something I'm already paying for instead of shelling out $150.  (And maybe without taking the time to try it myself.)  Thanks for your help! 

[Damien Symonds]

Hell, you weren't opening files in ACR to cull them, were you?????????????

[Kelly Greer]

NOOOO.  No no no.  Bridge.  Sorry.  But Bridge and ACR both take 5-10 seconds to open up the 100% view to check my culled images for sharpness.  Photo Mechanic is instant working on the thumbnails.  

[Brian]

Photo Mechanic is the FASTEST out of all of them for culling and tagging. I'm going to be switching to it next year and stop using Nikon's ViewNX, which is very glitchy. 

PM uses the JPEG Preview instead of the Raw (blah) file. That's why it's so fast. LR gets slower with each new version and if you have lots of photos in your LR Catalog, it tends to run even slower. A separate catalog for each job or one for Business and one for Personal keeps things separated, but it's still not as fast for culling / tagging as PM. 

[Kelly Greer]

Thanks, Brian!  PM it is!!  (Got it based on one of your recommendations in another post, and it's sped up my workflow by lightyears!)