Lightroom and Photo Mechanic sync Question

[mpfuchs]

I've just come back from a trip and need to work through a lot of pictures.
After hearing lots of good reviews about Photo Mechanic I signed up for the trial.
So far it's been great, the previews load instantly. No waiting like in Lightroom.

Now my process is to star rate and reject photos in Photo Mechanic before importing everything into Lightroom.

The problem is, once the photos are imported to Lightroom, and I make more changes in Photo Mechanic, those aren't reflected in Lightroom any more.

Is there a way to re-sync the attributes after import?
Thanks, Martin

 

[robgendreau]

If you use PM (or any other program) to change the photo files or their sidecars AFTER you've already imported into Lr those changes will NOT show up in Lr automatically.

You have to use either the Synchronize command, or the "read metadata" command, to get Lr to see and read those changes.

Note that because of the way this works doing some stuff in Lr and some in PM can result in some clashes of metadata. Lr will ask if you want to overwrite the changes though.

 

[mpfuchs]

If you use PM (or any other program) to change the photo files or their sidecars AFTER you've already imported into Lr those changes will NOT show up in Lr automatically.

You have to use either the Synchronize command, or the "read metadata" command, to get Lr to see and read those changes.

Note that because of the way this works doing some stuff in Lr and some in PM can result in some clashes of metadata. Lr will ask if you want to overwrite the changes though.

Thanks for that info, I think it did the trick but will have to play with it some more...
Now I just need to figure out how to assign unpick flags in Photo Mechanic. If not, I guess I'll use a color and convert that into unpick flags once in Lightroom so I can delete those out of focus pictures easier

 

[robgendreau]

IIRC the flags in Lr are called tags in PM. Note there is no "rejected" flag/tag. Generally people use the tags or star ratings in PM either before ingesting from the card/camera or shortly thereafter, but usually before import into Lr. Hence no need to send "rejected" to Lr because those images either were not ingested by PM or were not imported into Lr.

If you needed all three types of indicators to be imported into Lr (flag, unflag and rejected) I'd think that yes, a label might do the trick. Or even a rating.