Manual sort order not preserved on export as a catalog
When exporting a group with projects and albums, manual sort order reverts to name order. This problem goes back to version 8, at least. You can rename the manually sorted images in an album with a numeric prefix to preserve the order, but then you probably would want to remove the prefix after. If you do, you have to move a variant to make the the sort order manual and preserve it upon removing the prefixes. I have a couple of scripts to do this, but it is still cumbersome, especially when importing a thousand images or more in dozens of groups/projects/albums.
I have posted this problem before and reported it to the support team, but no one can explain why the problem exists or if C1 has any advice on how to remediate it.
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Which Capture One version do you use ? This was a well known bug of the 14.3, which was corrected with the 14.4 version.
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I am using 14.2. The problem has existed in every version since I started with C1 version 8. Good to see it has been corrected after so many versions. I have waited to update to version 14.4 until folks on the Forum had a chance to evaluate it.
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So, I'm not sure we are talking about the same issue, as that one of manual order sorting and exporting appeared as a bug of the 14.3, but didn't exist before (I also started with v8).
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It does appear we are talking about a different sorting bug. There are two sorting bugs of which I am aware. One just randomizes variants when you select manual sort order from an album in name order. The other causes a manual sort to revert to name order when exporting an album as a catalog or importing a catalog with manually sorted albums into another catalog.
Let me redescribed my issue:
My problem is how to do work away from my primary computer at home using my laptop. I shoot a lot of photos and sort them into groups, projects and albums similar to the structure of my main catalog. I manually sort the variants so that photos of the same subjects shot on different days appear together. When I get home, I import the catalog on the laptop into the main catalog.
The problem is that the manual sort order of the images reverts to name order when imported. The only way around this is to append a prefix number to the variants in the manually sorted albums and then remove the prefixes after import. Even so, if I then move the prefixed images into an existing manually sorted album, the sort order of the moved images is randomized.
I think the bug is related to another phenomenon. If you select manual sort order for images in a name sorted album, Capture One will move a lot of the variants around randomly, unless you have manually moved at least one variants position in the album, first.
So, I work around this bug by manually sorting an album that I am going to import, then attach a numeric prefix to the manually sorted variants using the batch rename function, import them, and then remove the prefixes with a script made for that purpose. If I intend to append these images to an existing manually sorted album, I first append a prefix to that albums variants, copy the variants into that album and then remove all of the prefixes.
Like I said, this problem goes all the way back to my first use of Capture One in version 8. Apparently, while C1 keeps the information about manual sort order, it is unable to retain manual sort order when exporting an album.
You can reproduce this by creating a test catalog with a project, importing a few photos into an album in that project, sorting them manually and then exporting manually sorted album as a catalog. The sort will revert to manual and changing the sort order to manual will just randomize the sort order. If you just import the test catalog into an existing one, the same thing will happen.
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Jerry,
The practical full proof answer for creating a repeatable grouping of images (and variants of images) would probably be to tag the variants in some way and use a smart album to group them.
That's not the same as a manual order of presentation, of course, but does (or should) be able to cater for your grouping requirement.
As for importing a catalog into another catalog I'm not really sure what one should expect given the potential for the catalog settings being different in some small but significant way in both the "Master" and the "to be imported" catalog.
Personally, I would tend to use a session when on the road - but then I rarely use catalogs anyway. Whether using a session in your workflow example would make any difference to the reported problem I rather doubt. Much depends on how the internal storage of a manual sort order is handled within a catalog database and whether the data referencing mechanism used would still be valid after an import activity.
If the method used is intended to be portable across catalog aggregation activities then the apparent failure suggests that the import activity (and maybe other aspects of manual display order settings) have been overlooked within the import process functionality.
Since this apparent problem seems to have persisted for a while one wonders if the problem one of portability across catalogs that might require a significant design change to accommodate the requirement.
Either way I assume that you will have submitted Support Case requests over the years without success? It may be necessary to make create another as a reminder that the issue is still a "live" problem.
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Thanks for the thorough comments. I think the limitations may be inherent in the database structure. C1 engineers may have been concerned about the situation where one imports a manually sorted album into an existing manually sorted album, which could be too big a coding challenge. This may be why they chose to export manually sorted albums (as catalogs) with the albums reverting to name order.
The strange thing that has no obvious explanation is what happens when you select manual sort order in an album in name order. If you do this, your thumbnail order will be semi-randomized, unless you first move at least one of the thumbnails.
I think the solution to the manual sort order anomalies would be to associate a hidden prefix with the file names. This would require a dynamic renaming every time a thumbnail was moved, but it would allow export and import of manually sorted albums.
Meanwhile, using batch rename to preserve manual sort order when moving images solves the problem, albeit with an extra step to remove the prefix.
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