Comparison
Photo Mechanic has been the standard for two decades and it earned that. We haven’t out-featured it — this page says exactly where.
A real recommendation, not a rhetorical device. If two or more are true for you, buy Photo Mechanic.
Lamplit is in early access: a 14-day trial, no checkout yet, and downloads paused while a new build is published — the honest state of things is on the download page.
Everything you kept it for. Nothing you put up with. The table is where that gets tested.
Feature by feature
Read the concessions as carefully as the wins. They are the reason to trust the wins.
| Lamplit | Photo Mechanic | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Partly: $79 a year is the intended price. Founding members keep $59 a year, permanently. Free during the beta — there is no checkout yet. | Yes: $149.00 / year, $14.99 / month, or $299.00 one-time, including one year of updates and support. Photo Mechanic Plus is $249.00 / year. Free for 30 days, one trial per customer. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Platforms | Yes: macOS 10.15 or newer, universal binary. Windows 10 or newer, x64 and ARM64. No Linux build. | Yes: macOS 13 (Ventura) or higher; a 64-bit edition of Windows 10 or higher. Source: docs.camerabits.com |
| RAW formats | Yes: 29 raw file kinds show a picture, tested on 2,792 real files from 1,086 camera models against an independent render. Every model is published by name, and so are the 35 files that show nothing. | Yes: Two decades of camera support, and the deepest back catalogue of edge cases in the category. For a specific body, check Camera Bits’ own compatibility documentation. Source: docs.camerabits.com |
| Ingest from card | Yes: Primary plus an optional backup destination, {date} subfolders, rename templates, skip-duplicates. Every file is written under a temporary name and never overwrites anything; a SHA-256 check of every copy is one tick away, off by default as in Photo Mechanic. | Yes: Ingest from cards with renaming, resolution adjustment and watermarking during download, and more than one card at a time. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Culling | Yes: 0–5 stars, eight colour labels, pick and reject, undo and redo across batches, keyboard-first throughout. | Yes: Eight colour classes plus none, set with single keys 0–8. Source: docs.camerabits.com |
| IPTC and IIM | Yes: Synchronised XMP and legacy IPTC-IIM (APP13) inside JPEGs, XMP sidecars for RAW, patched in place so existing Lightroom or exiftool metadata survives. Stationery pad with {variables} and =code= replacements. | Yes: IPTC metadata through customisable stationery templates, with variables and code replacement. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Export | Partly: JPEG only. Long-edge resize, quality, filename templates, with ICC, EXIF and IPTC carried through. No TIFF, PNG or HEIC target. No watermarking. | Not verified: Watermarking is documented as part of the ingest workflow. We have not verified their full export options and will not summarise them from memory. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Transmit to a desk | Partly: FTPS and SFTP with saved connection presets and remote-directory templates. Plain FTP was removed for security. Passwords live in the OS keychain. No S3, no Dropbox, no web-service integrations. | Yes: FTP upload. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Filtering | Partly: Rating, verdict and colour chips, plus free text across filename, camera and lens, a capture-date range, an ISO range and a focal-length range. No saved filter presets. | Not verified: Not verified on their site on this date. Assume it is at least as capable as ours and check for yourself. |
| Collections and catalogue | No: None. No virtual sets, no saved selections, no catalogue. Lamplit works on the folders that are already on your disk. | Yes: Photo Mechanic Plus adds an image database that catalogues images across multiple storage locations. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Side-by-side comparison | Yes: Two to six frames at once, each navigating independently. Per-pane zoom, with optional synced zoom and navigation, and one key to pick the winner and reject the rest. | Yes: Comparison viewing. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Histogram and analysis | No: Not built. No histogram, no exposure warnings, no focus peaking. You do get zoom to 10× with a live percentage readout, and a hold-to-magnify loupe, for checking focus by eye. | Yes: Histogram analysis. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Interface | Yes: Dark and light themes, flat and quiet, designed this decade: the photographs carry the colour, the controls carry none. Every rating, flag and label is reachable without the mouse, and most shortcuts can be reassigned. | Yes: A long-established interface that a great many photographers know cold. Customisable keyboard shortcuts. Source: home.camerabits.com |
| Multiple folders at once | Yes: Tabs. Several folders open together, and the session comes back the way you left it after a restart. | Not verified: Not verified on their site on this date. |
| What updates cost | Yes: Included for as long as you subscribe. That is what the subscription buys: support for cameras that do not exist yet, ongoing releases, and someone to answer you. | Yes: Subscriptions include updates and support while subscribed. The perpetual licence includes one year of updates, after which it keeps working on compatible operating systems. Source: home.camerabits.com |
Every Photo Mechanic cell above was read off Camera Bits’ own pages on , and each one links to where. Cells marked · are ones we could not verify that day — we leave them empty rather than fill them in from memory. Prices and features change; if you find something stale here, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page. Lamplit is not affiliated with Camera Bits, Inc., and Photo Mechanic is their trademark.
Read this part twice
Not a fine-print disclaimer. These are real gaps, some of them will not close this year, and any one of them can be decisive for your work.
Every strange body and firmware quirk someone hit in 2011 and reported, Camera Bits has already met. We can publish every file we have tested precisely because our record is young enough to list file by file. Theirs is twenty years deep.
Photo Mechanic generates contact sheets. Lamplit does not, at all. If your workflow ends in a printed sheet, this is a hard stop.
No exposure analysis at all. If you cull on clipped highlights rather than on the picture, FastRawViewer is a better answer than either of us.
Photo Mechanic Plus catalogues across storage locations. Lamplit has no database — a deliberate choice, and also a missing feature.
Fifteen years on a wire desk is evidence. We have none yet. Weigh that honestly; we would.
You can buy Photo Mechanic outright for $299 and keep running it. Lamplit is a subscription. If renting software is a line you do not cross, that settles it.
Switching
Short answer: there is nothing to migrate.
Lamplit has no catalogue and no library. It reads folders that already exist on your disk and writes standard metadata back into them — synchronised XMP plus legacy IPTC-IIM inside JPEGs, XMP sidecars beside RAW. Writes patch in place rather than rewriting the block, so a caption Photo Mechanic wrote survives a Lamplit write and you can run both on the same shoot on the same day.
The one real cost is retyping your stationery pad. The full item-by-item list — including the four things that don’t come across — and a ten-minute test you can run on a shoot you have already delivered are on the switching guide.
Questions
Not yet. There is a benchmark harness in the codebase and no published results from it, and any figure printed before a real measurement would be marketing rather than fact. When measurements exist they get their own page, with the method attached, so you can run it yourself. Plainly: if it is not faster on your cards, do not switch.
Yes. Ratings, all eight colour labels, picks and rejects, and captions are written as synchronised XMP plus legacy IPTC-IIM inside JPEGs, and as XMP sidecars for RAW. Writes patch in place, so metadata that Lightroom, exiftool or Photo Mechanic already put in the file survives.
No. There is no AI culling, no scene ranking, no eye detection, and none is planned. No AI picks. Your taste is the product.
No. There are no colour or tone adjustments, deliberately. You get non-destructive crop, straighten and rotate — baked in at export, never into your original — and an exposure preview for judging a frame, which is never written to the file. Lamplit hands off to whatever you already edit in.
No. There is no catalogue and no library. Lamplit opens folders that already exist on your disk and writes standard metadata back into them. If you stop using it tomorrow, everything it wrote is still readable by everything else.
Yes — Windows 10 or newer, on x64 and on ARM64. macOS 10.15 or newer, as a universal binary. There is no Linux build and there is no plan for one.
Both platforms, decoded by the operating system rather than by a decoder we bundle. Nothing to install on macOS. On Windows, HEIC goes through Windows’ own decoder, which may need Microsoft’s free HEIF and HEVC extensions — and Lamplit showing HEIC on a real Windows machine has not been checked yet, so treat it as unverified there.
Not to cull. Everything happens on your machine, and reverse geocoding works offline from an embedded gazetteer. Photographers work in stadiums and basements; that shaped the design.
Not yet. The app has a 14-day trial and takes licence keys, but there is no checkout on this site, and downloads are paused while a new build is published. Leave an address and you will hear when it is back — at the founding-member price when there is one.
Try it on a shoot you have already delivered, so nothing is at stake. That is the only fair way to judge a culling tool.
We’ll email you when Lamplit can be downloaded, and about your trial. Product news only if you tick the box and confirm. No list sharing, ever.