Camera Bits Announces Photo Mechanic™ 4.5 Update

Version 4.5 of Photo Mechanic, has enhanced support for IPTC Data. A user can choose to encode IPTC characters as either Unicode (UTF-8), or with a specific character encoding (e.g. Mac Cyrillic) depending on their preferences or their location.

According to the their press release, the new features in Photo Mechanic 4.5 include:

New resizable IPTC/XMP dialogs that also include additional IPTC and XMP fields such as Location, Scene, Subject Code, Intellectual Genre, Rights Usage, and Contact Info fields.

Ability to arrange photos in an arbitrary order, including across multiple folders.

A five star rating system, compatible with other applications such as Adobe Bridge, in addition to the existing color class labels. Plus a Remap command to convert color class labels to star ratings or vice-versa.

A new Live Slide Show command to watch a folder for incoming photos and display these in a slide show.

Optional sharpening of thumbnails and previews within Photo Mechanic and for JPEGs exported with HTML.

A new Show Map command to plot a photo with embedded GPS coordinates in a window using Google maps. *

Customizable multi-line thumbnail labels.

Tabbed contact sheet windows with the ability to move tabs within a window or to other windows (Mac only; the Windows version already has a single tabbed window).
A new tool for converting IPTC metadata between various character encodings (e.g. from Mac Roman to Microsoft Latin1+Euro) or to Unicode (UTF-8).

A new Ingest Progress window that combines all active ingest processes.

Preliminary support for Microsoft Windows Vista.

Version 4.5 of Photo Mechanic is available as a free update for users who purchased licenses for Photo Mechanic on or after March 1, 2006 (or March 1, 2005 for educational licenses). Upgrades to Version 4.5 from older 4.x licenses will cost US$90. New licenses for Photo Mechanic cost US$150. For more info visit www.camerabits.com.