
At $150, however, Photo Mechanic costs as much as a retail version of Lightroom, becoming a cost barrier for many. Sadly, Lightroom is quite weak at quickly previewing images, so working pros and enthusiasts usually end up complementing the culling part of their workflow with additional software like Photo Mechanic. Those who try to cull images in Lightroom know that if a full-size image preview is not generated at the time of import, it can take a long time to render each image. Many photographers end up keeping all RAW images on their computers, because they do not want to go through the hassle of deleting bad images they will never use, only to realize over time that their hard drives get filled up quickly and their post-processing time takes much longer. And this gets even more painful when working with RAW images because operating systems usually have no built-in capabilities to view and properly render RAW files.

No matter what software one uses for post-processing photographs, the process of selecting what images to keep and work on, also known as “culling”, can be quite painful when dealing with thousands of images.
