I just did a trial of photo mechanic and did quite like it for culling and rating images. I was wondering if there are any other options to consider?
I've got capture one 22, but it is quite slow to generate previews. I'm thinking about getting new software on black Friday, but more likely to go for DXO photolab than upgrade Capture One.
This depends on what you want to do? If you just want to cull and rate, which is a small subset of why people use PM, there are several alternatives.
I would suggest Fast Raw Viewer which I use in conjunction with Photo Mechanic, but if you just want something fast and cheap to technically assess and cull images together with adding labels and ratings FRV is an excellent low cost program.
If I wasn't wedded to PM, I would probably use Capture One for culling as they have dramatically improved their culling tools recently, though the big changes might have been with V23 (I'm not sure). C1 now does the same as PM, and uses the embedded Jpeg for culling without the need to build previews, dramatically speeding up the culling. And they have added lots of other small things to speed up culling and rating for event and wedding photographers (but which will of course be of use to other types of photography, even though some of it is centred around using AI for face detection) . I've only played with the C1 culling tool, but it looked very good,
However, back to Fast Raw Viewer, as well as being very fast (it helps to learn the keystrokes) it also unusually and usefully allows you to assess the Raw file exposure and not just the rendered image, (you can assess the raw image in C1 as well, but I'm not sure if this part of the culling tool). In FRV you can also adjust exposure, contrast and sharpness which you can't do in PM) and this helps to assess slightly under or over exposed images at the culling stage. You can also compare up to four images at a time (PM is limited to two).
There are alternatives to FRV, which no doubt others will suggest, but PM and FRV are the only ones I've used. Except for Adobe Bridge, which also excellent and free. You don't need an Adobe subscription to get Bridge, only a free Adobe account. Bridge isn't as good a tool as FRV for culling, but is a better tool than FRV for general file management, something a bit closer to PM's capability.
