The New, Updated PhotoShelter Uploader for Photo Mechanic

The New, Updated PhotoShelter Uploader for Photo Mechanic

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We’re very excited to announce the launch of a brand new PhotoShelter uploader tool inside Photo Mechanic Version 5 (Build 15002). For those of you not familiar with Photo Mechanic, it’s an incredibly fast and full-featured desktop image browser. It allows you to ingest, select, edit, and distribute photos faster and more efficiently than any other program we’ve found. And, though you’ve been able to upload to PhotoShelter directly from Photo Mechanic for years now, the latest uploader contains more than a few new features and improvements worth getting excited about.

What’s New: A Quick Overview

This update makes the process of uploading to PhotoShelter from Photo Mechanic faster, more stable, and significantly more useful. If you have either PhotoShelter or Photo Mechanic, now’s the time to try these two power-tools together to improve your workflow from shoot to publish. (There are special deals on both at the bottom of this post).

Key Features

  • Upload directly to PhotoShelter without leaving Photo Mechanic
  • Browse your PhotoShelter collection/gallery structure from within Photo Mechanic
  • Create new PhotoShelter collections/galleries inside Photo Mechanic
  • Switch between the “listed” and “unlisted” sections of PhotoShelter and create new galleries/collections in either section
  • Set visibility permissions of new collections/galleries without leaving Photo Mechanic
  • Make images publicly searchable during upload
  • Opt to skip or rename files that already exist on PhotoShelter

Recent Improvements

  • Fewer steps to select, edit, upload, and publish images
  • Streamlined interface for dramatically improved ease of use
  • Improved performance and stability

Additional Features

  • Switch between multiple PhotoShelter accounts, including Multi-User
  • Resize photos on upload
  • Apply IPTC templates on upload
  • Rename photos on upload
  • Save a copy of uploaded photos to a local folder
  • Save upload logs to a local folder

Browse your PhotoShelter collection/gallery structure

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The new uploader allows you to see the exact collection and gallery structure of your PhotoShelter account in a familiar left-to-right column layout. This makes uploading new images to existing galleries (even ones that are nested several levels deep) both fast and predictable.

Create new collections and galleries

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You can now create new PhotoShelter collections and galleries from within Photo Mechanic. This feature removes the need to flip back and forth between Photo Mechanic and your web browser to set up new collections/galleries thereby lessening the number of steps to publish.

Set permissions from within Photo Mechanic

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One of the most exciting new features in this update is the ability to set the visibility of new collections and galleries from within Photo Mechanic. And, if you add a new gallery inside of an existing collection, you can simply choose to have it inherit its permissions and visibility from the existing collection as well.

Browse “listed” or “unlisted” areas separately

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The previous uploader displayed all galleries in a single list that made sorting difficult when you were trying to upload new images to an existing gallery. Now, the “listed” and “unlisted” sections of your PhotoShelter account are shown separately, making it much easier to find specific galleries as well as create new ones in specific locations.

Additional features

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The uploader also has a host of other features, most notable of which is the ability to add custom IPTC metadata templates to the images as they are uploaded to PhotoShelter. This is useful for photographers who want to add additional keywords or captions to their publicly searchable images to be indexed by Google. The uploader can also rename the images with search engine-friendly file names as they are uploaded to PhotoShelter. Example: A photo with the IPTC headline of “Cheeseburger” and the original filename “_DSC8564.jpg” could be automatically renamed to “Cheeseburger_DSC8564.jpg” at upload. The original file would be unchanged and the version uploaded to PhotoShelter would have a search optimized file name that also retains the original name assigned by the camera.

Putting it all together

In a nutshell, the new uploader removes the need to flip back and forth between PhotoShelter and Photo Mechanic in order to publish photos to the web. Previously, the old way required Photo Mechanic, a browser, many steps, and lots of clicking. Now, the entire process can be done without ever leaving Photo Mechanic. You can even cue up a series of uploads to different PhotoShelter galleries one after the other.

As of now, the Photo Mechanic uploader is the most full-featured of the six ways to upload images to PhotoShelter. We highly recommend Photo Mechanic to any photographer looking for a faster way to ingest and select images after a shoot (and we’ve tried virtually every program out there). For large shoots like weddings, music festivals, or multi-day events, Photo Mechanic can literally shave hours off of the image selection, captioning and keywording processes.  Add to this the new PhotoShelter uploader tool and you’ve also got a very efficient way to publish your finished images to the web for sale or distribution to clients.

Special offers

PhotoShelter members get a 10% discount on Photo Mechanic. Log in and visit the benefits & discounts page to get your promo code.

Photo Mechanic users get a 30-day free trial of PhotoShelter websites with the promo code PM1311 through 11/30/13.

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This article was written by

Product Manager at PhotoShelter, photographer at chrisowyoung.com

There are 14 comments for this article
    • Chris Owyoung Author at 11:00 am

      Hi Riccardo,

      You can only add images to PhotoShelter from Photo Mechanic. That said, I agree that it would be pretty amazing if our PhotoShelter archives could be managed from within Photo Mechanic (although I have no idea how that would work).

    • Chris Owyoung Author at 11:50 am

      Hey Raj,

      I’m also looking forward to an updated Lightroom uploader 😉 My main image editing workflow is done in Lightroom, but Photo Mechanic is (still) by far the fastest thing I’ve found for everything that happens before and after Lightroom. Many of my clients are news/editorial so speed is paramount. My workflow looks like this:

      – Ingest, caption, keyword and cull in Photo Mechanic
      – Import only the selects to Lightroom for editing
      – Export the finished files from Lightroom to my hard drive
      – Upload the finished files to PhotoShelter in Photo Mechanic

    • Chris Owyoung Author at 6:25 pm

      Hey Paul,

      You should definitely send the Camera Bits team a quick note with that suggestion. I personally have Photo Mechanic set to edit in Photoshop, and if I ever need to edit an image in another program, I just select the thumbnail for that image in Photo Mechanic and drag it onto the application icon in my dock (on a mac).

  1. Raj at 3:30 pm

    yep – nothing beats PM for speed. This is great. I used to follow your workflow and I may just go back to it as these new capabilities are awesome. Thanks!

  2. Katie Werremeyer at 1:15 pm

    Hi Paul,

    Katie from Camera Bits here. We saw your comment on “edit with” options. Good news! It can work with dozens of editors, including one editor for each file type PM supports. You can also add ten editors that are not in any way tied to a particular file type. If you would like some help figuring out how to do that, our support team is super helpful. 🙂 http://www.camerabits.com/support

  3. August at 10:36 pm

    There is a bug in the newest version when on a Mac running the latest OS maverick. The new collection, new gallery buttons aren’t active. When you start your upload, You have to click on listed then back to unlisted galleries then they become active. The folks at Camerabits are aware and are working on a fix.

  4. Ant Upton at 6:30 pm

    You can set up custom editors in the preferences pane – ‘Launching’, go to the Assign Specific Editing Application button and below the NEF and CR2 options you’ll see Custom 1,2,3…. highlight one and then click Choose and navigate to the application you’d like use and select.
    You can now Control/Right Click depending on your OS and then select ‘Edit with…’ and you’ll be given the options which you’ve just set up.
    PM really is the Mutts Nuts!

  5. Daniel J. Cox at 9:58 am

    PhotoMechanic is an amazing tool but I’m not sure of the benefit of a program for uploading and managing that does not allow virtually any editing of images other than a crop. Maybe PM now allows you to tweak the White Balance, Exposure, remove dust spots etc. like we have in Lightroom and Aperture. I would love to see an updated Aperture uploader.

    • Chris Owyoung Author at 5:12 pm

      Hey Daniel,

      If you need a single program to ingest, edit and upload, then Lightroom or Aperture will do just fine. My issue with those programs is that they’re great for editing, but really very slow when it comes to dealing with large numbers of images. Lightroom in particular takes much longer to get from ingest to selection because (to be useful as an editor) it needs to generate huge 100% previews for every image. Because I’m normally shooting on deadline, I just don’t have the time for Lightroom to catalog hundreds (or thousands) of images that will never be edited or delivered to the client.

      Photo Mechanic allows me to select the best stuff, organize it, caption/keyword it and then get it out the door – for these functions, I haven’t found anything faster. I still edit everything in Lightroom but by that point I’m only dealing with a handful of images.

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