Ingesting and Editing Photos Like a Pro

A couple of weeks ago, I was running a private landscape and seascape workshop. While driving between locations, we got onto the topic of how I organise my photos. When I’m teaching my Switch to Manual workshops, I show a process that just uses Adobe Lightroom. I do this because most beginner photographers don’t need to use the bells and whistles I have added to the process I use professionally. If you are selling pictures for a living, there are a few extra things that you need to think about, such as copyright protection and making discoverability easy. So, this week, I will share my complete end-to-end process of getting my images from card to computer.

Before we start the process, I think it’s worthwhile to mention the software products I am using. I prefer to edit my photos with Adobe Lightroom. I know there are other products that some people like to use, such as CaptureOne, which offers very similar functionality to Lightroom, or Luminar, which is mainly just an editing tool and lacks some of the organisational elements we will touch on today.

The second product I use is Photo Mechanic. It will be well known to you if you are a news or sports photographer. However, it has great uses for anybody who shoots stock photography and promotes their images through agencies such as Shutterstock or Alamy. Until recently, you could buy Photo Mechanic as a one-off purchase with unlimited updates. However, the developers of Photo Mechanic, Camera Bits, are trying to switch users to a subscription-style plan. If you are lucky enough to own the old product, it is still being updated for now, but they have warned that if an operating system change causes an issue, they will stop support.

For new users, there are two versions of Photo Mechanic, which you can buy with either a monthly licence of £14.24 for the standard version and £23.75 for the plus version. An annual licence is £141.60 for standard and £236.36 for plus. There is also a perpetual licence option, which is £284.15 for standard and £379.18 for plus, which includes updates for 12 months, and then after that, you either pay for a support licence, or you take your chance. It’s not cheap software, but as you’ll see shortly, if you need the functionality then it will save you hours of time, in which case, it then becomes cheap!

Let’s head into the software, and I’ll walk you through what I have found to be an efficient and effective way to get my images from the card to the point where I am ready to edit.

I’ll pop the card into the card reader on my laptop, and Photo Mechanic will automatically open the Ingest box. This is quite similar to how you might see the Import box appear in Lightroom. You can set this up by going to the Settings in Photo Mechanic, and the option on the General Tab, you want to check is to Show Ingest dialog, in the section headed “On mount of camera disk”.
I’ll walk you through the various options in this Ingest box, as it is pretty essential to get this right. I will always ingest the pictures onto my hard drive from a memory card, so ensure that you have the Disks box checked. All the available disks are shown in the box below, and I will select the memory card.

The next box I will check is this one: ‘Incremental Ingest: copy new photos only’. As the name implies, if you put your memory card back in your camera without formatting it again (or if you forget), then Photo Mechanic will only import new photos that haven’t previously been imported.

If you look at the file structure of a memory card, you’ll see that most cameras create various folders. This next box, Source Directory Structure, allows you to either retain all this structure, copy only the parts of the structure being used, or ignore the structure and bring all the images into one place. I prefer to see all the photos in one place, so I take the top option.

Next, we must tell Photo Mechanic how we want to structure our image filing system. I have retained a vast number of photos since 2011, so I want to have a robust system for archiving pictures from my hard drive to external drives. To do this, I will select the option “into folder with name” and then specify the folder structure in the box below using variables built into Photo Mechanic.

You can see the variables available by clicking on this box. As you can see, hundreds of variables can be used, and if you click on one, you can see a description of what the variable contains. You can either double-click on a variable to add it to a selected field or type it into the field, ensuring to put curly brackets around the variable name. This line of text will create a folder for the year a picture was taken; inside this will be a folder for the month, and inside the month will be a folder for the day. By adding a number after the variable name, we are telling Photo Mechanic that year will always be four digits long and month and day will be two digits long.

On the right-hand side of the screen, we will specify where this structure will be added to your hard drive or externally connected disk. I have set my Primary Destination as the Pictures folder on my hard drive. If you also want to back up your photographs to a different location, you can add this as a secondary destination. When I am out and about, I tend not to carry a backup disk with me, so I leave it blank and let my cloud backup with Back Blaze do the safety backup for me.

Many camera models allow you to lock files on your memory card to prevent deletion. When set to “Copy Locked and Unlocked Photos”, Ingest will copy the locked files first. Many sports photographers will shoot JPEG files to send them away to picture desks quicker and have a RAW version, just in case they want to use the extra data later. In this case, they can specify to bring in non-RAW files only while at the game. Once home, they can select the option I use to bring in both RAW and non-RAW photographs.

This next box saves me a lot of time and is what is sadly missing from Lightroom: the ability to add IPTC metadata to my files using different variables. Ensure the Apply Metadata Template to photos is checked, and then we’ll click on the Metadata (IPTC) Template button.

IPTC, or International Press Telecommunications Council, is a group of 60 companies that sets standards for exchanging news data for various common media types. They have defined a set of fields that news photographers should use so that different agencies and newspapers worldwide can understand who took images, what the images contain, and much more information. The metadata screen allows us to create a template that can be re-used repeatedly, as much of the information will be the same for each photograph.

I have added things like my contact information, how I should be credited when my photographs are used, and a copyright statement. I have used the year variable in this field, so I don’t need to update my copyright statement each year, as you have to do in Lightroom.

This top section is where the magic happens. On the left side of the scene, I can specify lots of information that will help describe what is in the photos I have taken and help me find them in the future. One of the ways I send images to news desks is through the agency Alamy. They have specific layouts as to what information their captions contain. You can see that I have used variables to mirror their chosen format. The location variables are pulled in automatically if your camera collects GPS data, and the little globe next to the field is highlighted in green. If not, you can add this information manually. The date field info is taken from the capture time recorded on your camera, so it is really important that you ensure your camera time is set correctly.

I’ve then added some free text, the word pictures, in the caption and then added two fields. Alamy wants its photographers to have a sentence in the caption that describes either who or what is in the photograph. I add this information in the field IPTC scene. Often there may be different things in each of the photos being ingested, so I will often not update this field as we ingest it into Photo Mechanic, but I’ll show you how to update this later.

The next element is a more generic description of the event, and I have chosen to use the Extended description field for this. The final part of the caption pulls in my name and how the image should be credited using the data at the bottom of the screen.

You can see that I have also generated keywords from the information included in the template. The event name, location information, my name and the names of anybody included in the shots are automatically added as keywords. I can also type in any other keywords as free text as well.

On the right of the screen is a field to name the event, and then there is the location information, which, as I said, can either be typed manually or picked up automatically from the GPS info if your camera has recorded it.

This is a template I know I’ll use many times so that I can click on the save button at the bottom. It is saved as a small text file. However, I want to have my regularly used templates available even quicker, so I’ll add them to the Snapshot menu represented by this lightning bolt. You can see I have several regular templates depending on who I am working for, so I select the one I want, and it will populate all the fields completed. I have made it easier for me to see which fields I need to add for each shoot by putting the text in square brackets – it would be great if I could also colour-code them, but unfortunately, that’s not been done yet by Camera Bits – if you’re watching, it would be really useful!.

So, let’s populate the template for this particular ingest and click the Close Template button.

We are back to the Ingest screen, and I suggest you check the Use Global Template button. I’ll explain why later.

Next, we will rename our files so they make more sense of what is included in the pictures rather than the generic name added by the camera. Again, I am using variables to add the date the photo was taken, the initials of my business, the event, which is pulled in from the metadata we have just completed and then a sequence number. You can set the start number and format by clicking the Set {seqn} variable button. Any leading zeroes determine how many characters long the sequence will be. The reset button will set the first sequence number to one.

The next part of the screen determines when you see your photos. One of the significant benefits of Photo Mechanic is that it generates previews of your photos extraordinarily quickly. Take the option Open Contact Sheets during Ingest, and your photos appear almost instantly at full screen size. Again, despite all the good work Adobe has done, it still can’t generate good-quality previews as fast as Photo Mechanic.

Finally, once the photos have been ingested onto the hard drive, I want the memory card to be unmounted from my computer, but I won’t erase the files, just in case something should go wrong before they have been edited, sent away and backed up. Click on the Ingest button, and you’ll see the images start to appear on the contact sheet screen.

As photographs are added, you can click on a thumbnail to see a full-size view of the picture. Hopefully, you can see the difference between the preview speed in Photo Mechanic and the equivalent in Lightroom. There are lots of tools you can use at the top of the screen and lots of information on the right of the screen, but as this isn’t a full tutorial of Photo Mechanic, I’m just going to show the things I use in my workflow.

If I want to look closer at any part of the photograph, click the Z button, and you will see a 1 to 1 view of the picture. The slider allows you to make the zoom either bigger or smaller. To see the full picture, press Z again.

You can also see if highlights or shadows have been clipped by selecting one of these options. Clipped highlights are shown in red, and shadows in blue. Again, if Camera Bits are watching, it would be nice to have a “show both option” as well.

The vital part for me is this check box under the picture. If I press T, a tick is added to this box to denote that the image has been tagged. You can, of course, click on the box as well. You can also add colour tags and number tags to the photos. Command or Control and 1 to 8 will add a colour tag. Shift and 1 to 5 will add a number tag.

You can go to the Settings in Photo Mechanic and define which colour is applied to which number. This time, clicking on the lightning bolt will give you the option of various editing programs, and it will set Photo Mechanic to the same keyboard shortcuts as the selected program.

For simplicity, I just use the T button to tag a photo. Once I have reviewed all my pictures and decided which ones to edit, I’ll close the preview screen and return to the contact sheet.

At the moment, I can see all the files that were ingested. By changing this drop-down to Tagged, I can just see the photos that I have tagged to be edited. But I’m not quite ready yet to start editing. Remember the Scene field I left to be populated in the metadata template? Well, I can now go to the Image menu and take the option Metadata (IPTC) template. You can also use the shortcut, command or control, and I. As we specified, use the Global template option on the ingest screen; the template used here is the same as the one we selected on the Ingest screen. Taking the option on the ingest screen to use the Local template would have allowed a different template to be used here. Some photographers may have a use for this, but I prefer to have the same template available for both.

I can now add the scene information to the template and select the option Apply Template to Selected. As it suggests, if you have several photos that all have the same scene description, you can select all the images, update the template once, and it will apply the updated information to all of the photos. Once I have updated the scene information, I can export the images to edit in Lightroom. The program that will be used for editing is defined in the Photo Mechanic settings on the ‘Launching” menu.

Select all the photos in the Contact Sheet while the Tagged menu is still selected, and then right-click on one of them. Choose Edit Selected photos, or alternatively, just press Command or Control and E. The Lightroom import screen will pop up, and you want to ensure that the action selected at the top of the screen is Add. This will add the photos to the Lightroom catalogue, leaving them in your hard drive where Photo Mechanic imported them.

I have already culled my pictures in Photo Mechanic, so I don’t need large previews built as the photos come into Lightroom, so I set the previews to minimal. For safety, I keep the Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates box ticked, just in case I have already imported pictures into Lightroom. I can add a preset using the Develop Settings dropdown at the time of import. The important thing is to ensure that the Metadata and Keywords boxes are set to none or empty. This will prevent the feature-rich fields we created in Photo Mechanic from being over-written. Click on Import, and we will be ready to start editing in Lightroom.

I am sure you’ll agree that adding Photo Mechanic to the workflow allows photographers who need it to add more defined metadata information faster and more efficiently.

The last thing to think about before I finish is tidying up your hard drive. We have brought all the tagged photos into Lightroom, but all the ones we decided not to use are still on your hard drive. You could do this daily, but I have a task to tidy up all the photos at the end of the month.

Go back into Photo Mechanic and use the Navigator on the left to navigate to the month folder in the pictures folder. Right-click on the month and choose Open Folders and Subfolders in New Contact Sheet. All the pictures taken during the month come up in one contact sheet. This time, instead of selecting all the tagged photos, I will take the option to select Untagged ones. We can now select all the images we haven’t used, right-click any picture, and choose Delete Selected Photos. Big health warning here. Only do this once you are absolutely sure that you have selected all the photos you want to keep in the future. I’m not responsible if you haven’t, as the images are permanently deleted. Although I am sure you have a good backup strategy that would allow you to get them back if you did make a silly mistake……… haven’t you?