PhotoTaken does the same job: choose your best images from a huge shoot, fast, on Windows and Mac. It pairs RAW and JPEG, writes ratings and color tags to standard XMP that travel into your editor, and ingests to two drives with verification. You buy it once. No subscription.
We are working photographers, and Photo Mechanic has been the benchmark in this category for over twenty years. We wanted to love it.
On our own machines it froze often enough that we had to force quit before we could do anything else. The license is per seat across the computers we work on. And the parts we leaned on most, RAW and JPEG that stay paired through a rename, and an ingest that verifies a second backup drive, were missing or only half there. We kept walking away frustrated, so we built the tool we actually wanted. It is called PhotoTaken.
Photo Mechanic beats us on some rows and we say so. This page is for the photographer for whom the rows below add up.
| PhotoTaken | Photo Mechanic | |
|---|---|---|
| Stays responsive on 5,000-frame folders, never freezes | ✓ | — |
| RAW+JPEG paired as one file (rename, move, drag) | ✓ | ~ |
| Dual-destination ingest with verify | ✓ | ~ |
| Tags in portable XMP, no proprietary catalog | ✓ | ✓ |
| Native Windows + Mac | ✓ | ✓ |
| Runs offline; no account or cloud | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-time purchase; no subscription required | ✓ | ✓ |
| Years on the market | — | ✓ |
Straight answers about moving across, and about the parts people worry will break.
Yes. It is a native Mac app for macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon, and a native Windows app for Windows 10 and 11. One purchase covers both, so you can put it on your desktop and your travel machine.
Yes. Ctrl+I (Cmd+I on a Mac) opens the full IPTC field set: creator and contact details, copyright, rights usage, credit, source, headline, caption, instructions, keywords, and location. Edit one file or hundreds in the same pass, and only the fields you actually change get written.
Stationery Pads save a set you reuse, and a pad can stamp every file as it comes off the card, backup copy included. Caption and copyright are also editable straight from the metadata panel, and everything is written to IPTC, EXIF and XMP together so it travels to whatever you open next.
Light covers caption and copyright. The rest of the field set, Stationery Pads, and EXIF editing are part of Pro.
Yes, and plenty of people will. PhotoTaken writes ratings and color labels to standard XMP, so anything you tag is readable by whatever you open next. Nothing is locked in a catalog we own.
They travel both ways. We read the XMP that is already beside your files and write ours back the same way, embedded for JPEG and TIFF, as a sidecar for RAW. Your editor sees the same stars and labels you set while culling.
No. Light is $69 and Pro is $189, each bought once. Every feature on the roadmap arrives as a free update, the trial is 14 days of the Pro edition with no credit card, and there is a 30-day refund.
