Q&A with David Riecks

From Ingest to Storing and Sharing, Photo Mechanic Saves Time, Money & Mental Anguish: A Quick Q & A with David Riecks

Industry: Stock & Assignment

Interviewee: David Riecks

Interviewee Profile: David Riecks is a professional photographer whose love of travel has taken him all over the world to photograph unique people and places. In addition to maintaining a position at the University of Illinois and his own photography business, he is a regular contributor on several professional forums and gives seminars on creating image intensive Web sites. He founded "Controlled Vocabulary," a resource to help others learn how best to build controlled vocabulary lists, thesauri, and keyword hierarchies for describing images in databases. He currently chairs the Stock Artists Alliance’s (SAA) Imaging Technology Standards and the American Society of Media Photographers’ (ASMP) Digital Photography Standards & Practices committees, and serves as the Chief Technical Advisor for the PLUS coalition.

Application: Photo Mechanic™ from Camera Bits

Web Site: http://www.camerabits.com

Application Summary: Photo Mechanic is a photo browser and workflow accelerator that has set the standards in its field for more than a decade. Users of the program can speed through the import, captioning, and editing process at a rate that goes unmatched, thanks to Photo Mechanic’s straightforward design and wide range of customizable workflow tools. The program's powerful Ingest command reads images from memory cards, flattens directory structures, applies IPTC metadata, creates backups on separate disks and renames files – all in a single step. Photo Mechanic speeds through the editing of large numbers of photos to select keepers, rename, classify, and organize, and its many output options allow photographers to easily create Web galleries and slideshows, print contact sheets, transfer photos to an FTP server or upload them to an online archive, share photos via email, store favorites and much more.

Q: You’ve said that Photo Mechanic is the most significant part of your workflow. When did you start using the software, and why?

I’ve been using it for at least three or four years now – I learned about it from a colleague at the Stock Artist Alliance. I’m a Nikon shooter, and at the time, I had been using iView Media Pro for my workflow. It worked fine, but I became dissatisfied when I began working with RAW files in an XMP workflow. IVMP was fine with JPEGs and TIFs, but the new IPTC Core metadata didn’t transfer when working through an Adobe workflow. I would enter all my IPTC metadata after ingest-after processing through Adobe Camera Raw, none of the IPTC Core metadata, such as the full set of contact info (phone, email, website, etc.) as well as the new Location field would be missing, and I would have to re-enter that information. After figuring out how to properly set the preferences, I found Photo Mechanic to be much more configurable and powerful, and it eliminated the need to enter data more than once. Its batch-captioning feature was a real time-saver – IVMP did batch addition of metadata via templates, but it required an extra step to synchronize with the original file. Photo Mechanic writes the data immediately to the files, and as it can see my RAW+JPEG combo capture as a single file, means it is much easier to use.

I use the software every day. It’s the first and most significant part of my workflow, from Ingest to annotation (metalogging), to rating and ranking. More than anything else, Photo Mechanic simplifies the management process. It removes drudgery. All kinds of drudgery. It saves me time and mental anguish!

Q: What Photo Mechanic features do you utilize the most?

Let’s see… there are a number of things that stand out. Photo Mechanic is by far the fastest thing available for reviewing images. I used to have to wait to start reviewing until after everything had Ingested – with Photo Mechanic, I can review as it Ingests. Before, I would often “chimp” images (go back and review and delete images) in the camera before Ingest to try to cut down download time. Now I don’t need to – I can make changes as they appear on my screen, without affecting the Ingest process. Also, Photo Mechanic is one of the few applications out there that will look at a RAW + JPEG capture as a single image. So, when I read or add metadata to a set, I only have to use one file to do so.

I love the Ingest module. Before I used Photo I would sometimes forget to reformat a card after downloading, and then I’ll be out reviewing another shoot with a client, and old images would suddenly pop up on the screen. Now, when I return to Ingest new photos, Photo Mechanic automatically recognizes images that it has already downloaded and will skip them. I don’t have to spend the time later deleting copies of images I’ve already stored.

I really, really like that the IPTC Stationary Pad has an option to pick up the date stamp – “Use Capture Time” – to take the guess work out of dating images. I also really like the use of variables, because too many clients have re-named or re-titled images on their own, and then six months later they ask me to find an image using a file name I never would have used. That is why I use the variable {filenamebase} to automatically write the image filename into the metadata of the image. If a client changes the filename of an image, I can easily teach them how to view the image metadata and read the “Object Name” field so they can relay the correct data to me, and I can find the right image.

One of the things I’ve been happiest to see is that Photo Mechanic works on netbooks, and that’s very important. Lightroom, for example, doesn’t work well on netbooks, and Photo Mechanic still manages to do its job extremely well.

There are other examples… When I’m traveling, I’ll use an external drive to back-up my files. Photo Mechanic allows me to write to a secondary location with ease. I don’t have to repeat processes – one step, and everything shows up where I need it to be.

Often, when I’ve been out on a shoot and I’ve had time to review and delete unusable shots, I’ll have a list of favorite images that are now out of numerical order. When I delete or rearrange images with Photo Mechanic, it allows me to easily re-number images in the order I want, which is really helpful when I’m dealing with an editor or a client who wants to know what happened to missing images. Instead of having them ask me what happened to shot 125 when their contact sheet skips from 124 to 126, I now have the images presented in the order I prefer. Otherwise, I always use the star ratings and color categories to mark favorites and flag images for deletion, and of course, as you know, batch-captioning happens instantly. Plus, with latest version I can export my preferences and pick list annotations in one step, so I can replicate the set up on another computer. It’s just such a powerful program.

I’m still in transition between iView Media Pro and Expression Media for cataloging images, but find the search features very slow. I’ll occasionally use Google Picasa – the indexing is really, really fast – for finding images, but Photo Mechanic can’t be beat for metadata entry. It’s always my first choice. It does so much so quickly. I’m really looking forward to how the software with evolve with the photojournalism field, especially with the move towards video. Dennis [Walker, founder and president/CEO of Camera Bits] and his team are so great about listening to customer feedback and anticipating photographers’ needs, so I don’t doubt that Photo Mechanic will continue to be one of the best things out there.