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March 21, 2007* – Software developer Camera Bits Photo updated their work flow management program Photo Mechanic to version 4.5, which was announced this week. The updated version includes improvements in the Unicode IPTC, a new Structured Keywords feature, and HTML exporter. Photo Mechanic 4.5 ships this month at $150 for new users and at $90 for existing users.
"Photo Mechanic is one of the few applications available that can be trusted to flexibly, properly, and safely handle IPTC and XMP metadata editing for photos, especially RAW photos," said Camera Bits president and founder Dennis Walker in a March 19 company press release.
Used by press agencies such as the Associated Press, according to the release, Photo Mechanic is geared towards professional photographers with large volumes of photos to browse and manage their images with select editing functions. The existing version of Photo Mechanic allows IPTC/XMP metadata to be read in different photo file formats including JPEG and RAW. Version 4.5 now allows users to choose to encode IPTC as Unicode or another specific character such as Mac Cyrillic.
The new Structured Keywords function lets users attach a hierarchical keyword system to their images, essentially ranking the photo metadata by relevancy.
Other features include a new HTML exporter to create web galleries, a five star rating system, and Caption Safe that allows users to undo metadata changes for RAW images.
Interested users can preorder Photo Mechanic 4.5 at www.camerabits.com. Version 4.5 is free for users who purchased it after March 1, 2006.