Does anyone use Photo Mechanic AND Lightroom?

Just wondered whether anyone, like me, finds Lightroom generally slow for browsing images (especially when rendering full size previews) and uses Photo Mechanic for ingesting images to their computer, grading them, adding IPTC data and copyright info THEN only importing those best images into Lightroom for further work ie. adjusting WB, colour, cropping and printing etc.

Although Photo Mechanic is "only" a browser - it does seem to work far more effectively than Lightroom in this area.

... or is it just me?

TJ

[EDIT: Just a note: even if I set LR to generate 1:1 previews on import - it STILL seems to take an age dispaying them)

I suspect it is your system...I have over 50,000 images cataloged in Lightroom and it responds very rapidly. Never have to wait for it.

I dont have lightroom, but i run most of my process though bridge and the Camera Raw plug in in conjunction with PM. I use PM to import everything so i can custom label the IPTC data, sort though, and browse much faster then i have in any other program (including my limited work with LR) bring them up in RAW and do basic exposure and crop edits, save them in the file format for whoever i am shooting for at the time, and have 20 images uploaded to the client within 20 min after the event ends max.

I use ImageIngester to ingest, then iView to catalog and sort. Then the selection goes into LR.

I don't use Lightroom (I'm still sold to Photoshop), but I tried it once. No matter how handy Lightroom can be, it can't compare to PM when it comes to IPTC, browsing, selecting etc. For me, PM is pretty much fastest solution for such things, but yes it's not editor.

Thanks for all your responses.

I keep gong back to PM 'cos of it's speed and ease of use. Nothing seems to compare doing what it does. OK, it isn't an editor, and I find LR does a lot of things more "conveniently" than CS2, but it just doesn't quite cut it for me when it comes to browsing images.

Thanks again.

TJ

I'm another for using PM first for gross sorting and eliminating throw-aways, then importing the surviving images into LR to start the real post processing.

Considering that PM uses the JPGs embeded in RAW files (at less than full res), vice decoding and rendering a full RAW file, there is no way Lightroom can touch PM for speed.

Sure Lightroom loads an image in 2 seconds. But PM does it in .02. Stuff like that matters when you're sorting hundreds of images on a deadline.

PS: Also, if you use voice tagging on photos (for captions or other such things), PM handles the wav files perfectly, seamlessly integrating them into the image previews. I'm not quite sure how to use this function (if it even exists) on LR.

Yeah PM is great for viewing, sorting, eliminating photos. Very quick and easy.

LR you have to press delete then (extra window delete from catalog or disk). PM you press the delete button and it's gone. I love that.

LR you have to go up to the top of the left menu to zoom. Or I think there is a shortcut way too. But you can't exactly tell how much your zoom is. PM you have that little sliderbar that tells you exactly how much your zoom is.

And I think the PM selection method is better too. LR puts a very faint color around the box but PM you see a distinct color in selected images.

But LR does have advantages because you can edit on the fly and quickly export to photoshop.

I'm not an advanced LR or PM user so my words are probably not the best. But this is just my experience using the two.