Spotlight Search Returns to Photo Mechanic for Mac (And, a SALE!)
(5/1/2020) Update: The The Upgrade Sale is now over. We hope you got the latest Photo Mechanic and are off and hitting deadlines.
(4/2/2020 3:48PM PST) Update: The new build of Photo Mechanic 6 is now available
If you’ve used prior versions of Photo Mechanic on a Mac, you may have seen a search box at the top of the Contact Sheet. This was the “Spotlight” search box and it was simply a way to use macOS’ built-in “Spotlight” search. It had a few drawbacks – It didn’t index XMP files, so metadata that was stored in XMP was invisible. It had a hard time with RAW files. So if you added a keyword to a RAW file and then tried to find it with Spotlight search, you’d get nothing. This was a problem for a lot of users. It was only available on Macs, and sometimes cross-platform Windows users were confused by that.
We originally thought that the Catalog feature in Photo Mechanic Plus would solve all of this. It works cross-platform on Mac and Windows. It handles all file types. It searches all the metadata. It is much much faster. It is just better in almost every conceivable way. And in early testing, having two separate types of search; Catalog vs Spotlight seemed superfluous and confusing, causing problems in the UI. So, we removed Spotlight search from the Mac version of Photo Mechanic 6 and patted ourselves on the back.
We’ve heard from users that there are a few significant use cases for Spotlight search, particularly for finding newly-added JPEGs before they can be scanned into a Catalog. In fact, our users had come up with many clever and crucial uses for Spotlight search that we had not anticipated. Bringing it back into Photo Mechanic 6 was not a straightforward task. After getting so much feedback about this issue, we’ve decided to listen and make the change.
A Spotlight search feature similar to what existed in Photo Mechanic version 5 was added to the limited public beta of Photo Mechanic Plus and tests have gone well, so the Spotlight search will come back to Photo Mechanic in the next production build of Photo Mechanic 6 (for the Mac only). We expect this sometime next week (The week of March 30, 2020). If you have enabled Photo Mechanic’s Check for Updates in Help > Software Update, you’ll get a notification.
We’re also looking to take some pressure off folks dealing with losses during this time, so we’ll be making an adjustment to the price of upgrading from Photo Mechanic 5 to Photo Mechanic 6. Upgrades from Photo Mechanic 5 to Photo Mechanic 6 will be just $49 as soon as the new build of Photo Mechanic 6 is released, so keep an eye out for that. That pricing is expected to last through the end of April 2020. We will post on our social channels and in our Newsletter as soon as that happens.
Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback on this. We pride ourselves on listening to that feedback, and acting on it even in the rare cases that it means a significant course correction. We hope this change will help people get back to saving time in Photo Mechanic and enable folks to hit the ground running as soon as they can get back to work when the time comes.
Stay well, everyone.
(P.S. There will also be $15 off new licenses of Photo Mechanic 6, and for users at accredited educational institutions, our EDU pricing will also be $49 for new and upgrade licenses for the duration of the sale)
