Yes, you read that caption right. In the last three years of my business, I have been able to cull every single wedding day in one hour (or LESS!) So, how in the heck is that possible? Well, I’m going to tell you about the program that will become your new best friend:

Photo Mechanic: A photo browser that allows you to cull through your entire wedding day of images, as fast as you’d like, without having to wait any time for images to fully render. Once you select the images you want to keep, simply drag and drop them into Lightroom and begin editing RIGHT away. It’s that simple!

Here’s how it works:

After a wedding day (or a portrait session!), I place all of my RAW files onto my hard drive. Then, I open them in Photo Mechanic by opening a new contact sheet:

That will bring all of my files from that shoot up, just like this:

From there, I click on an individual photo and begin scrolling through the images. They are all fully loaded, right away, no matter how fast I scroll – which means there is no time that I have to wait to ensure the image is in focus! I can click any number on the keyboard to select that image (and I click the number “6” because it changes the color to aqua! Typical!

Once I’m done, and I’ve selected all of the images I want to edit, I exit out of that window to go back to viewing the entire gallery. Then, I click the black box in the bottom right-hand corner to remove all of the images I didn’t want to keep. It doesn’t change anything about the files on your hard drive (they are all kept in the same place!), but then you can drag and drop the images you DO want to edit into Lightroom (and you won’t take up extra storage space with images you don’t intend on editing!)

From there, Lightroom will upload only the images you selected in Photo Mechanic and ta-da: you are ready to begin editing, just like that!

This program has been a major life-saver in my business and has created so much extra time for me to focus on other things. If you aren’t using it, you need to get your hands on it NOW. And the best part? Photo Mechanic has provided me with one FREE lifetime license to the program! Want to enter to win? Click below:

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