Anybody use a program in front of Lightroom for "ingestion"?

Helvegr

I had been reading a bit about how some people use Photomechanic in front of Lightroom in their workflow because of its ability to better ingest memory cards, and for its speed at culling images.

Just curious of anybody uses such a process. I liked the idea of being able to hook up multiple cards, do a single renaming import, and copy those files to two backup drives, all right up front.

Lightroom can import from multiple cards, but I'm not a big fan of the way they implemented the ability to copy a file to a second drive.

I've got a bit of a trip coming up, so I was just pondering my travel workflow a bit, wishing I had a better way to get multiple cards onto multiple drives at the end of each day of shooting. Then bring those drives home with me, for the full import into Lightroom.

arodney

Not a direct answer, but I will say that when I have to ingest multiple cards into LR, I find it is just faster and more effective to copy all the card images into one folder, then conduct a single import. Having to sit and wait while one card is ingested, then do it again and again just seems too time consuming. The other benefit is that in LR, you have a temporary ‘collection’ called Previous Import that would show you everything in that big folder you imported, then you can handle everything at once (keywords, metadata stuff, editing out poor images, flagging etc). If you import one card at a time, the last imported group isn’t in this temporary collection.

aktse

Helvegr wrote: »

I had been reading a bit about how some people use Photomechanic in front of Lightroom in their workflow because of its ability to better ingest memory cards, and for its speed at culling images.

Just curious of anybody uses such a process.

I love PM for the speed and been using it for years as a sports shooter. Camera bits is working on a new engine for it and teased that it's even faster. I hate LR due to the ingest speed and do my initial pass in PM before I got into LR or PS.

As for others that use it, Zack Arias moved to that workflow about two years ago.

Helvegr

arodney wrote: »

Not a direct answer, but I will say that when I have to ingest multiple cards into LR, I find it is just faster and more effective to copy all the card images into one folder, then conduct a single import. Having to sit and wait while one card is ingested, then do it again and again just seems too time consuming. The other benefit is that in LR, you have a temporary ‘collection’ called Previous Import that would show you everything in that big folder you imported, then you can handle everything at once (keywords, metadata stuff, editing out poor images, flagging etc). If you import one card at a time, the last imported group isn’t in this temporary collection.

Thanks for the response. Lightroom still has the ability to ingest multiple cards at the same time, which is nice to give you a single import. What I don't think it does a good job of removing the initial step of backing up the files. I usually convert my files to DNG, then slap in some meta data. However Lightroom's 2nd copy only copies the original file, not the converted DNG.

aktse wrote: »

I love PM for the speed and been using it for years as a sports shooter. Camera bits is working on a new engine for it and teased that it's even faster. I hate LR due to the ingest speed and do my initial pass in PM before I got into LR or PS.

As for others that use it, Zack Arias moved to that workflow about two years ago.

I was actually just watching that video the other night. I hadn't really thought of adding software in front of lightroom before. My hesitation at this point is that PM is $150, and while it would do a great job,I'm just not a professional in demand of that type of software I think.

I'm considering trying out ImageIngester as lower cost alternative. Something that would just take all of my cards, rename them all to my naming pattern, add simple meta data, then copy those .NEF files to two separate external hard drives plugged into my laptop.

Then, i can do a single import from this drive into Lightroom on my main computer, convert to DNG and good to go. I'm curious about the culling of images in PM though, as Zack Arias does. I like the idea of a "cleaner" LR catalog. However on the flip side, I like having the organizational ability that LR provides for all of my images, whether they be selects or not.