Smugmug & Photo Mechanic
stoner27
Registered Users Posts: 7 Beginner grinner
Hi,
I have recently started to use Photo Mechanic, mainly for culling, when done i export to Lightroom. I would like to know how to incorporate Smugmug into Photo Mechanic to upload photos from, I have looked at how to do it but am unsure what to do ! I use the Lightroom Smugmug plug in now to upload but it is very slow.
Col
I have recently started to use Photo Mechanic, mainly for culling, when done i export to Lightroom. I would like to know how to incorporate Smugmug into Photo Mechanic to upload photos from, I have looked at how to do it but am unsure what to do ! I use the Lightroom Smugmug plug in now to upload but it is very slow.
Col
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Comments
The speed of publish from Lightroom is limited by the internet speed. I do not think you will find anything you do in PM to be any faster in that regard. And unless you intend to drop lightroom entirely, to use PM to publish lightroom edited photos you would need to export them again from lightroom, open as a new contact sheet in photo mechanic, then push up to smugmug from there.
Now that said, if your desire is to avoid LR entirely, and just push the images from PM directly, there is a Smugmug Uploader. It's under File, Upload. You fill in your account information and it will push them up. For raw images, on Windows it is limited to the built in previews; on Mac I'm not sure, as I think it integrates with the OS level raw converter. And obviously if you are shooting JPG's it can push those directly. I think I tried it once in the deep past, but it didn't fit my workflow, as it could not incorporate LR edits.
PM is much faster for culling, sorting, maybe some IPTC/EXIF functions primarily because it uses the previews for speed. But when it comes to actual internet transmission, I would not expect it to be much faster if any at all, that is just bits-over-wire speed issues.
That's sounds like what i will be doing, culling & keywords in PM, edit in LR and upload to my website from there. I may try the LR edited photos in PM to upload just as a test but couldn't figure out how to set Smugmug up, i will look again. I am on 100mb internet speed & I usually get a upload speed of around 5 to 6 which isn't a lot but Smugmug & my Internet supplier say is enough for it to upload fast enough, it takes hours but i am uploading around 2000 photos at 3mb each.
I do motorcycle racing mainly, most of the riders use the same number so it wouldn't be a big job to sort keywords out but it is new to me tbh.
Just one thing about cropping in PM ? When you crop, how do you save the crop ? In LR when i crop i just press enter and it crops, if i make a mistake the crop is non destructive so i can re-do it. I used PM for the first time yesterday and cropped the photos as required, it showed the crop box on them all so i thought they were done, when i dragged the photos to my HD they weren't cropped !
I only shoot JPEG by the way.
Col
OK, I need to backtrack. I have zero experience with JPG. With raw, PM writes an XMP file which LR respects and applies and it works exactly as if I had applied the crop in LR.
With JPG, I don't think XMP's can work at all, so i think PM is writing the crop information into the JPG file, but is not actually cropping it. I just tried one experiment with this, and that is what happened -- I took a JPG not in LR, cropped it in PM, and dragged and dropped it in LR. It imported, and when I looked at the image in Develop, I could see the whole image, and the crop overlay exactly where I put it in PM.
There are a ton of options that control how PM interact with raw and jpg photos; it's possible there's something I have set that allows that, but I never shoot JPG so I do not think I did anything on purpose.
Culling is obviously the big win, but I found cropping was almost as much of a speed up.
On the other subject, personally I prefer to change metadata in LR, as while 95% of my metadata is set right after the game, I do go back and change things over time, frequently putting off individual player coding until later to get the game shots up quicker for example. If I do it all in LR there's one consistent place, one keyword list, etc. But both are really quick for metadata.
Col
in PM you can set predefined crop aspects using the lightning bolt. You first set it to constrained, and what you want, then save that as a preset. You can then just click and select the size you want, and when you crop the next photo the overlay is that aspect (or in the current photo it switches when you touch the pointer to a corner -- it is not like LR where it switches immediately, you have to do something before the overlay changes after you make the selection).