I didn't want to pay $300 for photo mechanic, so I wrote a free, open source script that brings one of its most powerful features - code replacements - to Adobe Bridge to speed up my metadata workflow!

^^reposted ^^with ^^permission

Hi all!

PhotoMechanic is pretty ubiquitous for high-volume photographers, but for someone like me who doesn't take nearly enough photos and can't justify the cost, its features are out of reach. Unfortunately, the next best thing, Adobe Bridge, is missing one really awesome feature that Photo Mechanic has: Code Replacements.

So, I decided to implement them myself! It works very similarly to PhotoMechanic: you type a "substitution" into a metadata field - for example, [[tDate]] - and it gets replaced with another string - in this case, the date the photo was taken.

There's almost 100 substitutions for all kinds of things - time and date, camera info, exposure info, metadata, etc. I also just finished implementing special "functional" substitutions that perform more complex behaviors and calculations.

It's called Text Substitutions and you can download it for free from GitHub! You can find information about how to use it on the Wiki.

I'm still actively developing it, so I'd love to hear what you all think about it.