How to find out in which album(s) a picture is stored
Can anyone give me a hint about how to find out in which album(s) a picture is stored?
Let’s say I have a picture on screen that I have found after a search action.
Often I want to know in which album or albums this picture is stored.
Thanks in advance!
Rudy (The Netherlands)
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There isn't a way built in to Capture One. I don't know whether it can be done with scripting.
It would be a useful feature - and you are not the first to ask!
Ian
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Let’s say I have a picture on screen that I have found after a search action. Often I want to know in which album or albums this picture is stored.
It is physically stored in a folder, not in an album. It can be assigned to one or multiple albums as kind of a link. Ian is right there is no way to see in which album(s), but you can find the folder in C1 or the folder in the file system where the image file is stored. Goto main menu>Image>Show in Library or Show in Finder respectively.
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Just right click and select "Show in Library"
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Hi Rachik Bouanani - the trouble is that Show in Library just shows you the physical location of the image file in the Library. It doesn't show you what albums (which are virtual collections) the image may have been added to.
Ian
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Hi Ian Wilson,
Of course it will not show you, it was designed in the opposite way.
The User Collections are just pointers to the real images in folders (or In-Catalog).
The use case to find the album(s) that contain an image is not relevant, but the opposite is.Unfortunately, what you are searching for is not in place, and I doubt this feature will be added, because few users need it.
Sorry my friend Ian,
Have a nice day,
Rachik0 -
I do know that about user collections! And it's not me that was asking for this feature, so I am not disappointed. Quite a few users do seem to ask for it, in fact, though I agree with you that it may not be a feature that will be added. To my mind, one of the good things about albums is that images can belong to more than one album, but that also makes implementing a feature like this rather problematic. How would it easily deal with an image that had been added to more than one album?
Ian
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Here I am back again.
Thank you all for your opinion on the subject.
I see that it is a hopeless idea, to find the connections between an original, a variant and the place(s) the pointer to that variant is stored.
@Ian Wilson, thank you for calling it "a useful feature". Of course I agree, it has to do with managing your photo collection. And indeed, maybe it will be a little bit complicated to register the pointer to more than one album, but what is complicated, thinking of the techniques nowadays used in computers? My opinion: C1Pro nerds are absolutely NOT interested in improving the existing basic techniques, only in implementing AI driven new features. I can understand - the competitors do it, so they have too.
The same applies, for instance, to the PRINT dialog. In my opinion it is still very poor and never improved: it is even not possible to store a combination of settings. I can not imagine that nobody has ever asked for this kind of feature.
Another example: if the User Collection gets complicated with Groups, Projects and Albums (that is: organising pictures), I would really like to use a search field to find back a specific Project or Album. I remember Aperture (yes, a long time ago) had that feature and I used it a lot. I asked for it and several users agreed that they missed it. The C1 team was and is not interested.
Sorry for my complains. Anyway, I understand from your replies that it is not my fault that I could not find the solution.
Finally I will share with you my workaround for the question in my post.
I make a keyword for all pictures in an Album. This keyword is the path to the specific Album the picture is stored in. So a picture of my face in an Album called X that resides in a Project called Y in a Group Z has a keyword Z<Y<X<Rudy. All pictures in that Album have the keyword Z<Y<X. For example, when I search for a picture of my face using a keyword search on ‘Rudy’ in “All Images”, I get a lot of hits (I am popular in my own photo library). When I select a certain picture and when I am curious in which album it had been stored, I look in the keyword list of that picture and find: Z<Y<X.
What is your idea about this solution?
Rudy.
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@SFA, thanks for sharing your opinion.
Indeed, this can be done in an EXIF field. The reason I use keywords is that in the Keyword Library Tool it is possible to build a kind of 'tree' that resembles the 'layers' in which pictures can be stored, like my example Z<Y<X . A kind of parent<child system.
Before I start a new topic about searching in the User Collection for a specific Album, Project etc., who found a workaround for that omission in C1?
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> Ian Wilson: How would it easily deal with an image that had been added to more than one album?
You mean how it would easily return a list of collection names that have image xyz as member?
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Yes, I suppose that's what I was wondering.
Ian
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Ian Wilson: Yes, I suppose that's what I was wondering.
All you need is your C1 database file(s), the freely available SQLite tools and some basic SQL knowledge. The most work would be to familiarize yourself with the database structure (relations), but that will come in handy for all kinds of search operations that are not available in C1.
Back when i still used C1, I had made a set of useful SQL queries and scripts(*). I think my very first one answered the question you responded to,
Some years back, a forum member suggested sharing SQL queries or SQL scripts on the forum. Alas, there is always the remote possibility of unwary users harming their database. However; Enabling forum members to create their own SQL queries by discussing relational structure, table and column names etc on the forum, may perhaps be acceptable?
* Scripts: I used C1 on Windows and could not tap into possibilities discussed in forum topic "Development and Automation Workflows -Scripting". I refer only to general script languages, at least some of them work very well with SQLite. So do several programming languages.
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> SFA: ...OP has asked the question in a Mac related forum
Obviously, but my point is that there is a lot of potential even outside the world of Applescript and even outside Mac. Windows and Linux will do just fine, they only need access to the database file(s).
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zwartjens suggested using keywords and assign them to the images (or variants) which reside in static albums.
@SFA:
In effect the concept in C1 is to primarily think of Albums, etc., as grouping of files based on some file attribute rather than a known bucket into which the references to the files are dropped. The files need to carry with them their grouping references. It makes them portable and very easily grouped when a new group is required.
This is basically the base idea of smart albums, which filter on keywords or other metadata, why creating static albums when you can benefit from using smart albums in C1.
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I'm going to wade in here and comment that I don't understand the underlying premise of even wanting to know this information.
My image lives in a folder. "Images" are added to Albums manually. "Images" are added Smart Albums automatically based on some attribute(s).
That said, there is no "image" in an Album or Smart Album. Albums and Smart Albums are ad-hoc collections of pointers referencing the actual image in its actual folder. I can freely delete albums without affecting the underlying image file. I can freely add albums and add an image with no knowledge or concern with any other albums from which that image file may be referred. I can freely delete an image from an Album without affecting that image's inclusion in any other Album or Smart Album.
There's quite a lot of debate here on how one might "work around" this. My personal opinion is that correct usage of key words will allow finding basically any image you want no matter where it might live. This, after all, is the underlying purpose of a catalog vs a session.
C1Pro nerds are absolutely NOT interested in improving the existing basic techniques, only in implementing AI driven new features.
Also, I fail to see you why feel the need to slight developers or product management decisions at a personal level. We should certainly be able to explain "why" we want something and be open to using existing functionality if it's there, I think. After all, this isn't our private software development project. Taking a back-handed stab at someone feels less than professional to me.
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@Brian Jordan, I took some time and thoughts before replying to your last comment on my post. I wanted to reply carefully and English is not my native language.
First, thank you for sharing your thoughts about the necessity to know the place in an album of one or more pointers to a picture (yes, I know they are pointers and no pictures). Maybe it is not so relevant to discuss about the importance of that property. For me it appears to be relevant in practice, so I like to see it applied in C1. And I know since my posting that I am not the only one. From long ago it was a feature request. I really hope that readers of my post take me serious if I ask for a solution or work around.
And now about my sighs according to requests to the C1 developers and your comment to that. You make it more than clear to me that you don't like my complains about employees doing their very best to develop a nice and versatile product.
My complains were not about them personally but more about the apparent choices of the management. So my apologies for my in your opinion wrong suggestions.
Your complains about me were in fact more than clear - "this isn't our private software development project", "feels less than professional to me". Because of that severe reprimand I like to give you my opinion at last.
No, not my private software, but I paid for it and the developers do like to get information about possible bugs to be repaired. So why not requests for missing features?
Less than professional - sorry for that, but i hope that I could make it clear that it is not personal but about making choices at the level of management.
I saw that you are a moderator of this forum. That is the reason I wanted to explain my point of view to you. Know that I really want to keep this forum 'clean' and professional.
Rudy.
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This is quite simple and can be implemented with virtually no impact on performance. A simple right-mouse click on an image showing a small toolbar window displaying the names of the albums in which the image is referenced would do the trick. A similar simple improvement is allowing to search for orphan images, i.e., images that have been imported but that are not yet included in any album.
Why does C1 lack these simple features when it's obvious that quite a number of users would welcome them?
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I would not label an image as "orphaned" simply because it is not in an album. Not everyone uses albums for organizing images. Keywords and metadata are exceptional methods of keeping images organized because we can use the built-in filters to find images that meet specific conditions. We also have Smart Albums for frequent searches that we cannot perform with the built-in filters.
That said I agree it would be better if Capture One provided this search for us vs having to script it ourselves in AppleScript. Having Capture One provide this would make it available cross-platform and likely make it faster.
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Walter Rowe OK but I feel this is semantics. Fact is I have a number of images I imported before I was aware that the recent import history only contains so much instances before disappearing. (I was doing batch imports and still needed to develop my meta-data model with the keywords.) I probably have hundreds or thousands of images that I cannot find since they don't have keywords nor other meta data that I can use. Also if I perform a search, how can I tell whether the images found are already in 1 or n albums, since this is also a missing feature...?
An AppleScript is not the solution – also for the cross-platform compatibility as you stated; better User Experience design, however, is.
I chose C1 over Adobe LR after having reviewed them and read reviews. The Adobe UI seemed convoluted and outdated–and very much "Windows" like outdated like many apps on Wintel. C1 offered, IMO, a better UX and more pleasing interface. Maybe I also have a weak spot for the underdog. What worries me is that I see a lot of feature and improvement requests in this forum, but I wonder if they are read by product management and executives. This forum itself is not a good tool to monitor the user vibe and prioritize development in a structured and efficient way. I also doubt the design and development team is doing much user research and user testing with regards to UI and features... Lastly communication on features and their release date is not C1's forte either. Being a small company, C1 could leverage this to their advantage compared to a behemoth such as Adobe and cement customer loyalty.
I think I discovered another bug: I tried the search to look for [keywords] [does not contain] [*] in the assumption it would return all images with no keywords attached to them but this wild card does not work.
Then I tried with real keywords but it seems the [does not contain] returns the same result as [contains]. Same erratic behavior with e.g. equal / not equal. Now it seems the Advanced Search does not work properly at all... (But the simple search box does return expected results) – I guess I'll have to file a bug report with some video screen captures...Another note on the search: when typing in a string in the simple search or advanced search field, the program starts searching even if the full word is not typed yet displaying Apple's spinning beach ball of death. This causes unnecessary and long delays before one can complete the search. (10-30 seconds) Why not have a [search] button to activate the action...
To keep things positive: as a user I would be willing to invest time in giving feedback to C1 in a structured way – as opposed to posting them on this forum with little effect it seems – as I would expect some others here on the forum. However, I am not going to spend days meticulously describing and documenting them if it's to no avail. Maybe I should drop a line to the CEO...
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Look in the Keywords area of the Filters tool. There is a filter for no keywords. In the Filters tool you can use the "…" menu to enable more filters that are not visible by default.
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@Walter Rowe Thanks, that works. I'll post a bug report on the search in the appropriate category.
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@SFA Thanks, this does, indeed help. But advanced keyword search does not seem to work correctly. If I use Any in the advanced search (which is the same as typing the search string in the simple search on top) the results display the right images (in my case the used search strings can only be found in the keywords, not in file names or folder names) but using the Keywords in combo with equals or contains for instance, does not find images... I'm wondering if I have a problem with my instance/installation of C1. Only one way to know: doing a clean install I guess...
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Don't know if it's too late or even accurate but here is a sample of an AppleScript I made for me, with some SQL in it to allow cycling thru collections from a selected image/variant. Sorry, messages are in French ;) .
This code can be added to an applescript scpt file in the Capture One script folder and/or compiled as an application and accessed with shortcuts.
It should be modified for your usage as mine is to have user collections simply "piled up" at root "User Collections" level until they are moved to a "Published" user collection folder.
tell application "Capture One"
set selectedVariants to get selected variants
set nbi to number of items in selectedVariants
if nbi is equal to 0 then
display dialog "Pas d'image sélectionnée !"
return
end if
set varId to id of item 1 of selectedVariants
set collId to id of current collection of current document
set catalogDBFilePath to ((POSIX path of (path of current document as text) & name of current document as text) & ".cocatalog/" & name of current document as text) & ".cocatalogdb"
set nextCollectionName to do shell script "echo \" select zc.zname from ZVARIANTINCOLLECTION zvc, ZCOLLECTION zc where zvc.zvariant = '" & varId & "' and zvc.zcollection=zc.z_pk and zc.z_pk <> '" & collId & "' order by zc.zcollectionindex limit 1;\"|sqlite3 \"" & catalogDBFilePath & "\" "
if nextCollectionName is not equal to "" then
tell front document of application "Capture One"
try
set current collection to collection named nextCollectionName
on error errMsg number errNum
try
set current collection to collection named nextCollectionName of collection named "Published"
on error errMsg number errNum
display dialog "Error : No collection called " & nextCollectionName
end try
end try
end tell
else
display dialog "Pas d'autre collection trouvée"
end if
end tell0 -
Hi SFA thank you for the reference and feedback. I also doubt I have a disk problem – it's a brand new 4 TB SSD – but I do get faulty results... I am going to make a separate, small collection with a few hundred images and test there. If the problem can be replicated I'll send a screen recording to support.
Pierre Lagarde thanks for the script I am going to try it out!
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Erik V You're welcome.
To add some information, you can do a second script that looks for "Previous" Collection and cycle back by just adding the "desc" keyword after "order by zc.zcollectionindex ".
I use those shortcuts to call these scripts saved as local applications and another to go to Library's image :
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Weighing in here with a background in software ... I hope that this makes sense to most of you and I hope that someone in Capture One is reading this too ...
I switched from LR to C1 because of the vastly superior image quality at the time. To give Adobe credit they have improved their software and seem, at long last, to have eradicated the remaining 8 bit code from their platform. That being said C1, IMHO, still delivers superior images from my RAW files.I'm also going to hazard a guess that a higher proportion of C1 uses are serious hobbyists or professionals than is true for Lightroom. This is backed by interweb wisdom also known as a WAG (Wild Assed Guess)
I'm not going to argue UI semantics as that is a very personal topic; however I believe C1 to be lacking functionality in a few areas. These center around asset management and probably stem from an old and possibly limited database design (guessing here based on behavior and C1's reluctance to make some basic changes).
In my opinion there are a few fundamental tenets of a good and functional asset management platform:
- Ability to uniquely identify each tangible asset (image, video file, etc.)
- Ability to associate assets into groups (collections, galleries, albums, groups, projects, cadres or pick your favorite term) along multiple independent lines
- Ability to maintain a hierarchical structure of containers (projects, groups etc.)
- for example Industry, Region, Client, Shoot, image status (e.g. Fashion | Los Angeles | Delamy and Flunderbust | 20240401-04 Fall Look Book | Originals)
- Ability to identify all places where an asset is used / referenced
- Ability to associate metadata with the asset and have it track to all places where the asset is located
- Ability to add different metadata to different versions (formats etc.) of an asset (e.g. .RAW vs .jpg vs .tif etc.)
- Ability to search for assets based on name, capture date, metadata, characteristics, and (optionally) content
- AI is taking the world by storm and having it recognize and categorize images would be super helpful even if not 100% reliable (e.g. find all images of women's trench coats with a belt, find all instances of this person, find all pictures of fish etc.)
- Ability to rename assets on export to a flexible, structured naming convention (so the client gets a contiguous image numbering sequence regardless of the number of original images, cameras, shooters etc.)
- Ability to easily associate an exported image back to its original within C1 (this is critical and easily fixed I believe)
- Ability to manage multiple versions (variants) of an asset, each with its own unique set of metadata, associations, settings etc.Two UI / UX features I will recommend:
- Option to have groups and projects be presented in sorted order at all times (this should be trivial unless the database structure is *really* limited and rigid)
- Ability to collapse / expand one, several or all projects and/or groupsC1 hits most but not all of these points. Specifically there is no way to locate all places where the asset is used - a major weakness IMHO
Also there is no way (at least not that I've found) to associate an exported image back to its original within C1
I'm not going to dive into potential solutions to the first recommendation in the absence of a detailed knowledge of the internal architecture of C1.
The second issue, though, could easily be solved by storing the original file name (optionally with full path) in the Getty Original Filename metadata attribute.
If you got to this point and consider me to be a raviing lunatic you are welcome to your opinion (and you may even be right). However if you find a grain of truth and/or sense herein please weigh in with C1 and hopefully we can persuade them to finish off an otherwise amazing piece of software.
Thank you for your time1
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