After long weekday shoots, usually past 10 pm, I got tired of staring at Lightroom’s import and preview progress bars, so I started culling in Photo Mechanic instead and my first pass is just faster. On two‑body shoots my clocks drift a couple minutes, so I load both cards, set capture times off one reference frame, tag keepers with color, and write XMP before anything touches Lightroom. Z to 100 percent and arrow through is instant on 45 MP files on my 2019 MacBook Pro, and that alone saves me from the stutter and lag that kills my momentum. Then I copy only the tagged files to a Samsung T7 SSD, pull them into LR, and let 1:1 previews build while I make coffee around midnight instead of babysitting a bar. It still bugs me that we need a second app just to make culling tolerable, but I’d rather ship edits than sit there waiting on a catalog. For reference, PM6 with a USB‑C reader browses a full 128 GB card in a few minutes, handles Fuji .RAF and Canon .CR3 without slowdowns, writes sidecar XMP cleanly, and the color tags show up fine in LR, and I’ve had zero corruption or weird metadata surprises after a year of doing it this way.
Same here,I do the first pass in Photo Mechanic using embedded previews with auto‑advance on ratings, then only bring 1‑star+ into Lightroom. It cut my wedding culls by ~40% and I don’t wait on LR previews anymore.
Same here — PM is the only thing that lets me chew through 2k frames in ~20 minutes; turn on auto‑advance for tag/color and hit space for 100% checks, then only send tagged selects into LR so you’re not building previews for rejects. Using the embedded JPEG previews (default) keeps it snappy across Sony/Canon/Nikon bodies.