Catalog and Sessions
I've been a COne user since for over 20 years. I've always been using Sessions as that's all we had in the begining and when I looked at Catalogs I preferred sessions flexibility with my product and portrait photography.
While I'm still doing product work professionally I've been getting back to enjoying photography as a hobby with landscapes/nature/travel etc.
As I want to start printing/selling etc I'm thinking that I need to organize in a different way. Hence I'm thinking of using Catalogs now.
I guess I can start to import the images from my sessions. I have only been using one session for my landscapes/nature/travel but everything is saved in folders by date.
Each day out has its own dated folder. Organized like this:
Yearly folder, Folder for each month, then the date and sometimes a short description etc. Inside of which has a capture folder, output, working photoshop files, and finals folders.
Right now all is saved locally to my internal HD. I have all backed up to a Drobo NAS Raid. With the demise of Drobo, I will be moving to a different NAS in the coming months.
As my image count grows I do think I'll have to move stuff off my internal and have it just reside on the NAS, but I still want to be able to access and use COne in the NAS.
Any advice from Catalog users on what they would do to move from sessions to Catalogs?
Thanks in advance.
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You have two options for including images from sessions in a catalog.
- You can import a session into a catalog. File>Import Session... That will add all the session folders to the catalog. You may not want that - for instance you may be following the default session structure, with Capture, Selects, Output and Trash, in which case you may not want all of those added to the catalog. (Some people for instance, don't include Output in the catalog.)
- You can import just some things from the session into the catalog. This is the approach I use. I add the session Selects and Output folders to my catalog, but I don't want to add the Capture folder or the trash folder. If I had wanted images to be kept long term and to go in the catalog, they would have gone into Selects before now.
With your system of file organisation you could consider importing a yearly folder (making sure to include subfolders). You need to make sure that you are choosing to Add to catalog (which means that the catalog references the images but doesn't make copies of the image files) not Copy to catalog (which copies all the files thereby doubling the storage space needed). And you need to make sure that you have checked the box to include existing adjustments. The catalog will generate previews for the images and store those inside the catalog - it doesn't reference the existing previews in the session folders.
You can always move some of the session folders later to an external drive at some point - perhaps a subject for a different discussion at some other time.
I'd recommend creating a small test catalog, and importing a small number of images into it to see how this all works - perhaps one week's folder. That won't alter or harm the existing images and their folders in any way so you can feel free to try it out.
Ian
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Regarding organization of a catalog. I want to point out at the outset of my suggestions that with a fast computer, and robust keyboarding, how you organize is not critical, as long as you have some way of aggregating all of the images you want to aggregate.
Many people organize images by year. It is easy to review your photo's by age, but not of much use in finding a particular image. I organize my catalog by subject with branching subcategories, much as I would keywords. For example, animals/vertebrates/mammals/dogs/ or people/family/family name. For anything related primarily to a location, country/state/city/area or feature. For events not unique to the location, organization/event. I do use albums labeled with a time or date if I return to a location, or a yearly event, but this album is always at the most peripheral branch.
I also store my image files as referenced files with a structure reflecting the same organization, up to a point. The The idea is to preserve the basic organization on the storage medium as well as the catalog.
This organization makes finding an image very intuitive, assuming you have some memory of the circumstances, location or subject of the photo. However, as Capture One has improved its search speed when searching on keywords, it is possible to use almost any method of organizing a catalog if you assign relevant key words. Searching on one or a few keywords takes only a few seconds, even in a large database (my largest is around 65,000).
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That won't alter or harm the existing images and their folders in any way so you can feel free to try it out.
But don't move images within the catalog, that will actually harm your existing images.
I'd take Ian's good advise a step further, make a copy of a part of your images (or all your recent hobby images), maybe even onto another computer, and only then play around.
Note that once your images are references by the catalog, any adjustments you do in the catalog will not be synchronized back to the session (or the sidecar files in the settingsxxx folder).
Ian doesn't care about that, he is fine to hand over the 'responsibility' from the session to the catalog once he thinks it is time to do so. That is fine and straighforward.
I use a slightly different approach, I use the catalog only for searching - and a dummy session (with no images imported nor hardly any album) for editing. (Or you could use the existing sessions for editing if you open them separately.) The base idea with the dummy session is to search in the catalog regardless where the images are stored and then drag&drop them to the session in an album where I do the editing, then remove them from the catalog and import (or "synchronize" an appropriate top level folder) to get them back into catalog. I too (as Ian) import the images into the catalog only when I feel the time has come to do so (when a session is sufficiently finished).
In my approach the session is the "leading system" (more precise the image files and its .cos and .comask files in the settings folders), I can always create a totally new catalog and import the files including latest adjustments, my catalog could break down then I don't care too much. This way I can also just move a year from my image file system hierarchy to elsewhere and adjust my catalog, in Ian's approach once the catalog took over, any additional adjustments, variant, metadata etc. are in the catalog, which is then the leading system. You can also move a year out (but only from within the catalog) and hope the catalog doesn't break down.
C1 was born with sessions in mind (not catalogs) and sessions are still the more robust concept.
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My post crossed with Jerry C's.
Yes, keywording and IPTC metadata (and mainly using smart albums = saved filters/searches) is a must in my approach as I want to rely on the catalog static album hierarchy as little as possible.
My folder structure on the files system is similar to yours, Peter, folder year> sub folder "iso" date and short description, with a few exceptions.
2023
20230902 Channel Islands
20231002 Safari in the local zoowith 20230902 the start date of the trip. If there are many images from the channel islands I might create a sub folder by date or by location
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BeO: "But don't move images within the catalog, that will actually harm your existing images."
Move in what way? What harm?
In a catalog, when I move/drag an image by dragging its thumbnail in order to re-sort them manually, or to another album I have never had any harm come to the image and I do this a lot.
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Hi BeO - I don't know either what you mean by your warning not to move images within the catalog. Can you explain? I do it without harm frequently.
Ian
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My warning is related to the tip from Ian
I'd recommend creating a small test catalog, and importing a small number of images into it to see how this all works - perhaps one week's folder. That won't alter or harm the existing images and their folders in any way so you can feel free to try it out.
More precisely I should have replied: Don't move images within the catalog from one system folder to another, this will actually move your images on the file system. This will not harm your images and settings/adjustments within that catalog, but it will harm the integretity of your session based folders by separating the image files from the individual settings fiiles.
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Thanks Everyone all for the information. I have a good handle now on how I'm going to switch over to catalogs.
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