Moving folders of referenced images in the Finder or Explorer (Mac/Windows) will result in broken links and the images will be displayed as Offline. Fortunately, folders and their contents (i.e., source image files) can be moved from within the Catalog’s Library tool. This feature can be used to organize folders locally, but it can even be employed to move folders and their images to an external drive. This allows the Catalog to keep track of referenced images wherever they’re moved to and maintain the link between them.
Note that all of the source image files (i.e., RAW, JPEG and TIFF etc) within the folder will be moved whether they are all referenced or not. You can use the Synchronize feature to import and reference any additional images.
- In the Library tool tab, go to the Library tool’s Folders dialog.
- Navigate to the folder that requires moving and then click and drag to the new location.
- The receiving folder or directory will be highlighted and a warning dialog will open to remind you that the folder and its contents will be moved and that the operation can not be undone. While the operation can not be undone using the Undo command, the folder can be moved back. To do this simply repeat the actions from Step 2.
Comments
7 comments
How can I move files to another hard drive? I Tried Drag + command-key
I only want to move the files that are referenced in the library. The file handling is pretty annoying to me.
It Copies the hole Hierarchie
this is not working at all with Mac OS 10.15.6 (19G2021) und Capture One 13.1.2.37.
I Just distroyed 20 Years of hard work!
Hi Andreas,
Thank you for the comment.
If you want to move the folders of referenced images, please drag them to another location on your local or external hard drive. Then, the images will be shown as offline in the Browser inside Capture One. Select those offline images with the "?" sign on the thumbnails, right-click, and press Locate.
Lily,
The Capture One team needs to understand that this is not an ideal solution. What needs to happen is the use of 'relative addresses' for files and not 'absolute addresses', especially when dealing with a perfect copy of a collection of files.
Perfect example: I had 250+ Gb on an external hard drive we'll call Drive X. I copied all of those files to a new 2 Tb external drive, Drive Z.
When I open Capture One 21 it shows all files missing. I'm presently using the 'relocate' function, but it is laborious... and unnecessary.
I'll illustrate further. In the old drive, files were located here:
drive x/folder a
drive x/folder b
drive x/folder c
Now they are located here:
drive z/folder a
drive z/folder b
drive z/folder c
So, if the address to the folder is relative, there's not issue: location = .../folder a, etc.
The problem with the 'relocate' is that it permanently transfers the address to the new location... so if I connect the old drive, I would have to use relocate all over again.
Please present this to the Capture One team as an urgent issue to address. There is nothing more alarming that having years and years of photos, keywords and albums go down the drain due to something like this. My database was corrupted during the 'relocate' process using Capture One 20... I was able to save things from a back up (losing only a couple months work)... but then I had to upgrade to C1 21 with the hope that would fix the problem. Fortunately, the relocate worked, but only as indicated above.
Knowing that its users have decades of files and data, better management of these things must be a top priority.
Best,
Tim
Same as Timothy Allen here. I had no good experiences relocating. Sometimes folders disappear in the catalog when originals still are in the disk. I have two external hard drives to reorganice my growing archive and I would prefer drop the folders in another disk but it don't appear in the library. I will try exporting some folder as a new catalog and then move other folders. Moving files from Finder and then relocating is not a good option, because CO rebuild thumbnails and other data and it take a lot of time. If there are some improving in that I would like to know. Many thanks.
Testing Capture One for the first time to decide on a raw editor as I'm just starting to use those.
I managed the photos the way I previously have in Windows, moving them to a final location after editing. I didn't do it using Capture One process first. All the files then showed as missing in Capture One.
I added the new location to Folders but Capture One failed to match them though I'd not changed the file names for the RAW files and all the attributes are still the exact same. Now I have a one raw image showing as edited but missing and duplicate raw file right next to it showing as unedited.
I then tried to right click on the individual picture, select Locate, then selected the raw file in its new location. Nothing happened. No change and no error message. If something fails, it should present the user with that information.
Then I tried removing the addition of the new location which moved the duplicate files. I was then able to use the individual file locator successfully to associate a file with the new location to make it 'online'. However I have to do this one by one by one by one. That is absurd when no attributes, especially not the file name has changed. It should simply allow you to point a set of photos to a new folder and then auto match (with confirmation option if confidence of match isn't 100%). That would take me an hour just do do this one set of photos, if it happened to longer history of files it would be impossible to take the time to re-associate each one individually.
This does not inspire confidence that, should I fail to move a file using the exact right order of steps Capture One's UI in the future, or if I rebuild my machine and don't have drives and folders exactly the same as they were, that I will be able to retain all the work that had been done in previous months and years. It feels like it might not be a case of IF you'd lose all your file associations, but when.
I didn't find this useful. It just didn't seem to do anything. Here is a link to David's comment about relocating an entire folder instead of individual files that helped a bit but there should still be an easier process to point to an entirely new disk, for example. Drives do fail and doing it one by one it too tedious. Reference to Timothy Allen's comment above.
https://www.captureone.com/blog/relocating-offline-files-catalogs
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