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Import C1 Catalogue - One Mac to another

dancar

4. April 2016 09:43

Hi guys,

Trying to get my head around a useable workflow with C1 and have found some things a little tricky to do. Such as relocate images in the Catalogue between different drives... and also another one:

Moving/Merging Catalogues from one Mac to another. The RAW are referenced on an external drive, so basically would like the adjustments, metadata, etc... to be carried over. As per say Aperture can do, and supposedly LR.

Nutshell of what I am after:
- Do shoot(s) out in field
- Import to Macbook and do edits
- Move RAWs to external drive (to clean space on the Macbook)
- Bring those jobs to the office iMac to continue working on or add to a master catalogue for that client

I have tried the Export Catalogue function, and then Import Catalogue function a few times now and think I must be missing something. If anyone has any good C1 brains to help that would be appreciated.

Basically when I Import an Exported Catalogue (I use Referenced files only, which are stored on an external drive for this instance) from say a Macbook to iMac, the import seems to carry out fine. As in no errors.

The imported Collections hierarchy is there. BUT there is no new Folder in the Catalogue itself, or no view of what seems to be a way to point the new Import structure to where those images now are.

If anyone has any ideas for such a workflow, that would be fantastic.

Cheers

Kommentare

17 Kommentare

Bob Weber

4. April 2016 18:17
I recently broke up my very large Capture One Catalog by exporting my images kept in five different folders.The new Catalogs were kept one an external hard drive. I keep the application on the SSD on my iMac. I exported each folder as separate Catalog, exporting original files. However, I did not import the new catalogs. I simply clicked on the new catalog when I wanted to open it, and the entire catalog, with subfolders and other information was opened in Capture One.
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HansB

4. April 2016 18:43
I have a different workflow. Just to show you another option.

Out in the field, studio and when tethering, I work in sessions.
As long as am actually working on it, I leave it in sessions.
When the session is no longer in regular use, I import the images into a catalog.

Shooting session: images on local disk,
working session: images on local (client work, short term) or external mobile (stock work, long term) disk,
and finally: catalog images referenced on external (mobile) disk.

I sync between mobile and home Mac.

Regards,
Hans
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lewisl

10. April 2016 18:39
Sessions are portable across machines.

Catalogs fundamentally are not.

Catalogs use absolute references (paths) to folders and images. So, even if you are using removable media, it is possible that the top of the path is associated with the 1st machine. So, you need to relocate everything on the 2nd machine. See other posts that this is quite broken and has be done for every file, not just the folders.

It does work reasonably to start with sessions, copy sessions to a 2nd machine, and "import image" (and leave in current location) to bring the images into a catalog on the 2nd machine. All settings and metadata come across. It works pretty quickly and without error. Sessions are simpler and a mature concept in Capture One. Catalogs are very flawed despite 3 versions worth of work.

We all hope Phase One will honestly assess where they are on catalogs and take on fixing the many problems.
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Peter Orczykowski

10. April 2016 22:35
This is not what you are asking for again, but another option... I use a portable Western Digital Passport Pro 4TB Thunderbolt RAID drive as my primary storage for images. It is bus powered, so ideal for travel. I keep my catalogue on the internal SSD on the iMac. Before going away, I copy the catalogue to the internal SSD drive on my MacBook Pro and take my external drive with me. This method works just fine, no links are broken and in the field images are imported to their final destination, so no further work is required. Back home I just copy the catalogue back to the iMac.
This approach obviously requires a solid backup strategy as you travel with your main storage drive, so I appreciate not everyone would be comfortable with it. I use Chronosync to duplicate my Passport Pro to NAS server and I keep another Passport Pro as identical copy which always stays home.

Phase One is clearly moving towards using a catalogue as their main storage strategy. Going forward it would make sense for them to stop supporting sessions. My personal opinion is that they only keep it alive for legacy and will kill sessions off once they get their act together with the catalogue. This will also spell the end of Media Pro.
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SFA

11. April 2016 03:35
[quote="NNN635397989495214331" wrote:

Phase One is clearly moving towards using a catalogue as their main storage strategy. Going forward it would make sense for them to stop supporting sessions. My personal opinion is that they only keep it alive for legacy and will kill sessions off once they get their act together with the catalogue. This will also spell the end of Media Pro.

You might be right but I would rather doubt it.

I suspect that many Pro users, especially those who shoot tethered at varied locations, would not require or desire a catalogue based solution. The session concept works more cleanly in that situation in my opinion.

In fact I feel no need whatsoever for catalogue functionality within a RAW developer program. Realistically it seems only to distract from the primary purpose of the tool.

I can understand why people might want catalogue many years' worth of output, although I suspect in some cases it is a particular obsession that is not shared by everyone - we are all different, thankfully.

What I personally doubt is the wisdom, or indeed the benefit, of moving older images, edited elsewhere, into a new editor (with different interpretations of the files) solely to use catalogue functions.

If people wish to revisit old images I fully understand - I often do so myself to come up with a new interpretation of old favourites or when someone asks for a print. But I would not consider doing that for tens of thousands of images unless there was an extremely good reason for doing so - and I very much doubt that anyone would have that good reason. If they did I doubt they would have the time to post anything on this forum.

I think it's safe to assume that most people appreciate suitably fast performance when actively editing images. Some may wish for instant response to everything, others may be OK with something a little slower. But generally we are seeking speed and agility - sports car not heavy haulage truck.

So why on earth is it important to have an entire archive on-line and active when editing a new batch of images - or indeed any image, new or old?

An archive should be an archive. Something worth keeping, presumably, but not regularly visited. By all means have a catalogue of its contents for browsing purposes - some jpg outputs for identification would be useful perhaps - but the entire archive is unlikely to be required minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

Sessions are, relatively speaking, the sports car performers. Using huge catalogues is like travelling day to day with in a large Road Train "just in case" you feel a need to look at an original artefact from the archive. Far too much baggage for my liking or needs.

Multiple catalogues to replace sessions? Well, that's an option but is less flexible than sessions so far as I can tell. I abandoned LightRoom after version 1 because I could not get in with the inflexibility of catalogues. I have never had cause to regret that decision and would make the same choice again if forced to use an approach that left no choice.

Just my opinions of course. Unlikely to be shared by all.

Grant
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HansB

11. April 2016 08:07
[quote="lewisl" wrote:
...
So, you need to relocate everything on the 2nd machine. See other posts that this is quite broken and has be done for every file, not just the folders.
...

For referenced images in catalogs:
If I move a complete folder with Finder, I locate that folder.
If I move a complete folder tree with Finder, I have to locate every folder.
But I don't need to locate every single image.

Regards,
Hans
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Peter Orczykowski

11. April 2016 08:40
[quote="SFA" wrote:
I suspect that many Pro users, especially those who shoot tethered at varied locations, would not require or desire a catalogue based solution. The session concept works more cleanly in that situation in my opinion.

In fact I feel no need whatsoever for catalogue functionality within a RAW developer program. Realistically it seems only to distract from the primary purpose of the tool.

And here is the problem that Phase One is facing. Amateurs and pros will almost always want a different thing from the software, at least in terms of priorities. C1 was originally written for pros (sessions) but they decided that they also want the rest. This carries a risk of creating a software Frankenstein, or a massive piece of bloatware 😊

I can fully appreciate the elegance and efficiency of a session approach. But amateurs (and that would include pros with their private stuff) "like" to have it all under one roof, a lifetime of images, including scans of old film. Please remember that with your private photos there is a continuity that you want to be able to access (search). This is not so important with professional work which is more consignment driven.

I just hope that Phase One makes a decision one way or the other and optimises the software for performance in both image processing and DAM part of it. In the end you can't keep everyone happy, so they'll need to make a decision and live with the consequences. I for one will probably stay here because of the image quality, regardless.
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Christian Gruner

11. April 2016 13:25
[quote="NNN635397989495214331" wrote:
Phase One is clearly moving towards using a catalogue as their main storage strategy. Going forward it would make sense for them to stop supporting sessions.

Nop, most of our users are on sessions, as they are per-job photographers. Sessions remains a very flexible document type, workflow-wise, and there no plans to discontinue this flexibility.
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HansB

11. April 2016 13:39
[quote="Christian Gruner" wrote:
...
Nop, most of our users are on sessions, as they are per-job photographers. Sessions remains a very flexible document type, workflow-wise, and there no plans to discontinue this flexibility.

That's good to hear. I am using sessions for all my actual and recent work. If I had to choose between sessions and catalogs, I would vote for sessions.

Nevertheless I do use the referenced catalogs. They come in handy here and there, to keep some old stuff at hand and to only carry previews around.

Regards,
Hans
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SFA

11. April 2016 13:48
[quote="NNN635397989495214331" wrote:

I can fully appreciate the elegance and efficiency of a session approach. But amateurs (and that would include pros with their private stuff) "like" to have it all under one roof, a lifetime of images, including scans of old film. Please remember that with your private photos there is a continuity that you want to be able to access (search). This is not so important with professional work which is more consignment driven.

I totally understand how people might well want a catalogue of their favoured imaged after processing. The case for keeping everything "live" and potentially changed after each major update and software enhancement is less clear to me.

A catalogue used to store the output results of the processed files, like a traditional printer album conceptually but revised for the digital age, makes good sense. Especially if it has been created in a way that offers easy identification of the "archived" original should there be a desire to re-process it for some reason.

Having years of old images - no matter what the source, made available every time a catalogue is opened sounds crazy to me. Remember that C1 is an Active Application. It expects the user to want to set to work on an image immediately based on the current settings for views and so on. This may not be how people really want things to work. The more traditional browsing of Previews or Thumbnails and only attempting to do anything with an image once selected for activity would be a better fit for a catalogue type of activity but is not really where Capture One sets out to be so far as I can tell.

Grant
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Peter Orczykowski

12. April 2016 08:17
[quote="SFA" wrote:

Having years of old images - no matter what the source, made available every time a catalogue is opened sounds crazy to me. Remember that C1 is an Active Application. It expects the user to want to set to work on an image immediately based on the current settings for views and so on.
Grant

And here is the problem. You say C1 is an Active Application with certain expectations. Well, it used to be and that was my point. Now they are trying to attract a much bigger volume of amateurs (a licence is a licence, no matter who pays) hence the catalogues. Having all those images available does not sound so crazy to me 😊 I just wish it worked better...

I also think that Phase One is trying to get some value from the purchase of Media Pro - merging the functionality and killing off Media Pro would save them a quid or two, who knows...
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SFA

12. April 2016 14:40
[quote="PeterO" wrote:

I also think that Phase One is trying to get some value from the purchase of Media Pro - merging the functionality and killing off Media Pro would save them a quid or two, who knows...

But Media Pro (and other similar full service (more or less) DAM products have a far wider target audience than just Photographers. They deal with many different file types and, historically, NOT RAW files.

An archive of digital documents in "commonly readable" formats makes some sense to me. Including RAW files with the need for an editor before anything can be done with them .... a less convincing proposition for the wider market but it might work in a Cultural Heritage case.

Grant
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Drugstore

13. April 2016 12:09
I'm really in need of the same solution. I'm talking about RAW not JPG. Coming from LR C1 is a real nightmare for any workflow solution.

On my MacBook I ingest images using Photo Mechanics, setting all Metadata and partly rating etc. by using xmp sidecar files. I import them into LR. All metadata and ratings are showing up perfect. I edit the images and afterwards I export the images to an mobile external drive (I use the imported folder in LR for export, but can also be done for certain images only. Everythings works like a charm).

On my iMac I have the main catalog on a raid system (one catalog for several thousand images, no performance issue so far). From there I "Import from other catalog". Select the catalog on the mobile drive and import everything into the main catalog. And Voila! Everything is where it should. I don't even need the raw files to export with catalog. I could copy them separately and I will be able to synchronize on a folder basis with the copied images.

Try to do this simple but effective workflow with C1.
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lewisl

13. April 2016 19:45
It "should" work.

You need to make sure that full sync is effectively on for both Photo Mechanic and C1. Generally, you can tell if it is for C1 because the activity window will tell you C1 is reading metadata. I think it may also be beneficial to have only one or other of the apps open at one time so that one app temporarily "owns" the sidecar files.

This isn't going to work for hierarchical keywords, which C1 can import, but not export in sidecars. For most other xmp field values it works. Color and urgency are a bit of an issue, but Photo Mechanic has a special setting to keep color label and urgency aligned per old Photoshop/Bridge settings because C1 uses urgency to update color labels. (Yes, sheesh--many have pointed out it's time to just use the value of the label.)

Though both apps call it "sync", really all that is happening is that sidecars are being read or written: "last one in wins".

I am doing a similar thing, but with Lightroom standing in for Photo Mechanic. It's not the speediest thing, but for a folder of no more than a few hundred images (that's a big folder for me) it's acceptable.

As others have pointed out, this will work for raw files, but not jpeg and tiff. All other apps write metadata updates directly into jpeg and tiff files. This IS modifying the originals and some people reasonably object to that, as does C1. But, the standard is well-defined and it should not cause image degradation of a jpeg file. Not your issue, just pointing out for completeness.
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EnderWiggins

15. April 2016 14:10
[quote="SFA" wrote:
I totally understand how people might well want a catalogue of their favoured imaged after processing. The case for keeping everything "live" and potentially changed after each major update and software enhancement is less clear to me.
A catalogue used to store the output results of the processed files, like a traditional printer album conceptually but revised for the digital age, makes good sense. Especially if it has been created in a way that offers easy identification of the "archived" original should there be a desire to re-process it for some reason.

You do not seem to understand the idea of non-destructive RAW editing coupled with a DAM database backend, because this is what its all about. Nobody wants to "process" and store thousands of JPGs anymore, when you can just archive your digital negative, the RAW, ONCE and then have all the derivatives come from this single source.

I highly doubt that only amateurs find this idea interesting, looking at the huge number of professionals using nothing but Lightroom.

[quote="SFA" wrote:
Having years of old images - no matter what the source, made available every time a catalogue is opened sounds crazy to me.

Well, absolutely EVERY software package out there, which wants to help your digital asset management by use of cataloging ALL your images in a database, locally or in the cloud, has exactly this idea in mind:

Aperture
Lightroom
Mylio
Apple Photos

Yet, this sounds "crazy" to you, just because somebody in Denmark has no clue of modern, highly performant database coding.
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SFA

15. April 2016 16:26
[quote="EnderWiggins" wrote:
[quote="SFA" wrote:
I totally understand how people might well want a catalogue of their favoured imaged after processing. The case for keeping everything "live" and potentially changed after each major update and software enhancement is less clear to me.
A catalogue used to store the output results of the processed files, like a traditional printer album conceptually but revised for the digital age, makes good sense. Especially if it has been created in a way that offers easy identification of the "archived" original should there be a desire to re-process it for some reason.

You do not seem to understand the idea of non-destructive RAW editing coupled with a DAM database back end, because this is what its all about. Nobody wants to "process" and store thousands of JPGs any more, when you can just archive your digital negative, the RAW, ONCE and then have all the derivatives come from this single source.

I highly doubt that only amateurs find this idea interesting, looking at the huge number of professionals using nothing but Lightroom.

[quote="SFA" wrote:
Having years of old images - no matter what the source, made available every time a catalogue is opened sounds crazy to me.

Well, absolutely EVERY software package out there, which wants to help your digital asset management by use of cataloging ALL your images in a database, locally or in the cloud, has exactly this idea in mind:

Aperture
Lightroom
Mylio
Apple Photos

Yet, this sounds "crazy" to you, just because somebody in Denmark has no clue of modern, highly performant database coding.

I think I have not made my initial point clear enough.

I have never used Aperture so cannot comment on that but I did try Lightroom at version 1 and quite liked it except for its insistence on putting everything into a catalogue (at that time) which meant that, so far as I could tell, I needed to have 2 copies of the original files (jpgs usually or a few large Tiffs from the scanner back then) if I wanted to use a second editor for time to time. It made my "included with Canon" Zoombrowser software obsolete unless I was prepared to do everything twice.

I ran LR alongside LightZone for some time and in the end concluded I preferred LightZone - a product that was (and still is) very similar in concept to Capture One in Sessions mode.

Where LZ differs from C1 is that it is "old school" in its integration of browser and active editing. There isn't any.

You browse, you pick and image and then you go into Edit mode. You edit then you come out of edit mode to browse again. It's not quick way of processing large numbers of files although if you can process one image and then apply the adjustments to many you can batch process the changes from one image onto other that you select in the browser - much as you can in C1.

There were always comments about how much faster LR was than LZ. However I concluded that and end to end process of an image was much the same in both systems. LZ started the process, finished it and presented the results. LR started and quickly showed some significant changes on screen - which looked fast - and then finished things off once the viewer was impressed and thinking about what they were going to do next.

That of course refers to copying and pasting settings from one file to another (or applying a style or something similar) rather than manipulating tools and sliders to create the look you want as an editor.

With LR I got the impression that editing the file was working in memory on the screen preview rather the full file. Not too much of a big deal for a jpg and probably sensible for a huge TIFF "back in the day" when affordable computers lacked serious power. However once I moved more into RAW processing it was a less comfortable experience and consumed more time.

Where C1 differs, as far as I can tell, is that it make an assumption that if you are opening a session, a folder within a session or a catalogue you probably would like to have everything ready and available for editing ASAP. Selecting from the browser and then waiting for the image to be presented complete with all current settings (possibly not the same as when the preview was created) is not how C1 seems to be designed.

So you open a session or catalogue and quite a lot of processing takes places - possibly slightly constrained by any previously applied selection critieria. Furthermore everything that is presented is being calculated from the core file (assuming it is online in the case of a catalogue) with all .cos adjustments and current session parameters applied.

All to make everything current and speed up (at least conceptually, all other things being equal) the interactive editing experience. Based on my experience with large scanned tiffs in the other applications I have mentioned I would imagine that this approach was important for working with large MF files when the original design approach was adopted.

Is the architecture for the other applications mentioned based on the same approach? Can anyone comment on that?

Now, if I open a session with a handful full of images in the active folder things are ready in a flash.

If I have a few hundred images in the folder I can start things immediately but it may take a few seconds for ALL images to be ready to go. That has little impact on my ability to start work.

If there are a few thousand images things take a little longer and if I start changing stuff - especially the "global" settings like preferred recipes or proof profile the while set may be subject to revision. It might take a minute or two to establish a fully "current" session with a few thousand images/variants.

If I were to open a Catalogue with several tens of thousands of images it would likely take somewhat longer - yet I would not expect to be working on all of those images. Nothing like. So all of the preprocessing is a waste of time and clock cycles. Most of the time. Probably. When editing things.

As an archive - fine. But open it without the pre-processing for viewing. (For what it is worth it seems to me that putting everything in the cloud and synchronising stuff across multiple devices makes a lot of sense for phone contacts and calendar entries and selected (usually quite small) documents but much less sense for larger files other than, possibly, for part of a backup strategy. However that is a different discussion.)

Better still, have a system that can completely archive many types of documents - maybe the entire computer? - and is not dedicated, for historic "data" to photographs alone. It makes more sense, in my opinion, if one is taking a walk down memory lane or searching or a portfolio image that has suddenly raised some interest for a commercial opportunity.

As for "processing from the source file" - yep, I understand that too. Highly desirable but needs careful consideration IF the objective is to be able to produce identical repeats on demand with no further editing effort.

As I wrote previously "Remember that Capture One is an ACTIVE application".

When you open an image (or open the session or catalogue in which it is contained) it is processed ready for display.

So you get the edits you saved but the the current settings for Process Recipe, Proof Profile and, perhaps most importantly, how the current process engine version and tools understand the image and edit data previously stored.

For a RAW file in particular there may be some rather significant differences in the results.

Running in a Sessions the session may still be set to use the old Engine (if compatible) and so the results may be much the same. The session may well be quite well "frozen" in its own time.

Using a catalogue for several years worth of images including the most recent may not be quite as flexible. You will likely need to work with the latest greatest settings and perhaps accept that the image looks different or spend some time adjusting it. Kind of like working in the darkroom on each print.

A saved "final output" in jpg or TIFF (or whatever) format would be more likely to give instant identical results. I guess whether that is desirable depends on the purpose - instant print for a quick order process or a fresh re-work for a fine art print.

Somehow I just can't think that anyone will have circa 100k fine art prints in their catalogue (a number that often seems to pop up when discussing imports of catalogues) so where is the workflow justification for keeping a life's work "on line" and active for editing?

Unless things have changed dramatically recently anyone putting their images into Web based gallery solution with on-line sales opportunities is delivering a finished image (or images) - not a RAW file to be reprocesses before it hits the printer.

Likewise Getty, Alamy et al are expecting finished products not usually RAW files with an instruction to process in a particular version of a RAW converter (perhaps together with instructions for the steps to take it through 3 other applications before it is ready for dispatch to a paying client ....)

I very much like the idea of end to end processing in a single application and having an opportunity to easily revisit an image and enhance it or take a different approach. Great. Love it.

However if a client asks for a repeat of a single file or print or, worse, and entire disk full of images, the last thing I want to do is reprocess everything again.

The same applies for "social media". Why on earth would I want to take a 40Mb RAW file and process it down to a 200kb jpg more than once? (Or indeed at all, but that again is a different discussion!)

In my view being able to reprocess from RAW time after time is potentially a "nice to have" feature but hardly a mainstream necessity and really nothing at all to do with long term archival presentation in the mainstream market.

If asked "Why do you do that?" I would reply "Because I can." And I do. I just don't see it as a driving need for an archive catalogue. In fact I would suggest that it is undesirable. Which, perhaps, is a point proven by the distress that Apple's decision to abandon Aperture, despite its apparently insightful and excellent design concept and execution.

But that too is probably a point of discussion for another place and time.

Just my viewpoint of course.

Grant
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EnderWiggins

16. April 2016 19:34
[quote="SFA" wrote:
If I were to open a Catalogue with several tens of thousands of images it would likely take somewhat longer - yet I would not expect to be working on all of those images. Nothing like. So all of the preprocessing is a waste of time and clock cycles. Most of the time. Probably. When editing things.

As an archive - fine. But open it without the pre-processing for viewing. (For what it is worth it seems to me that putting everything in the cloud and synchronising stuff across multiple devices makes a lot of sense for phone contacts and calendar entries and selected (usually quite small) documents but much less sense for larger files other than, possibly, for part of a backup strategy. However that is a different discussion.)

I understand where you are coming from. But my impression is, that you did not spend enough time with the alternatives outside C1 to fully understand and appreciate how far behind it is in terms of sheer catalog performance (having used LR only with version 1 for example, and Aperture never at all).

The Aperture developers always strained the fact in their marketing, that what you see on the screen is exactly what the file will look like after processing. So they never took any shortcuts like Adobe with LR, which indeed always worked with a JPG preview in memory to speed up things. Aperture always worked with the full RAW file. In the beginning there were performance issues with that approach. Then Apple introduced a "quick view" mode, where the application only used the saved JPG previews for display. You just pressed a key and browsing through your database was lightning fast. Now in the end with version 3 it was so fast anyway, that you did not need this mode anymore.

So what you expect to be an enormous amount of "preprocessing" by using a complete archive for viewing as well as editing at the same time, was no issue at all for the Apple developers, simply by fully utilising the Core Image architecture of OS X to the max.

I believe the main issue now with C1 is that the Mac version will always be too slow, since it seems to share the codebase with the Windows version and Phase One can not fully use all the OS X imaging architecture. You can also see this with the odd window behavior. The C1 windows and the interface do not look like or behave like standard OS X interfaces at all. This is all proprietary stuff that seems to slow things down, coupled with a lousy database as the backend.

That's where we are now. C1 trying to become like LR and Aperture, but lacking the coding power for a performant application.
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