Fix Activation, it's a nightmare
Every now and again Capture One randomly deactivates itself, necessitating a full reactivation, which is a nightmare process that feels like the 1990s again.
The current process looks like this:
1. Capture One randomly deactivates itself and asks you to "Let's get started" again
2. You "activate" using the web portal and get taken back to Capture One
3. Ooops, it forgot to tell you you'll need your serial key again
4. Go back to teh website and dig up the serial number.
5a. If you have an activation left, plug it into the app and you're good to go.
5b. If you don't have any activations left, either deactivate all your activations or randomly try one of the activations and hope it doesn't deactivate your other machine.
Honestly, if free and donationware can get this right, why can't Capture One? If the app can log into my account, it should be able to retrieve this data, realise I'm reactivating the same machine, and perform the activation for me. This is not a difficult process.
Forget trying to catch up to Adobe with random AI buzzword tools and fix the core things about the process of using Capture One, please.
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Oh, and while you're at modernising this dinosaur, please make the update process happen within the app itself. Redownloading the entire installer from the site each time feels like a student project in programming 101.
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Agree with Dylan, the update process is clumsy and outdated. The SW should be able to update itself without asking questions and license keys etc.
Please don't push me new services and plan switches on the update page. Let me just update the application easily and without questions asked. It is not very easy to find the update link on the page, it says "Max eligible version: 16.4." in small, gray text while other stuff is more outstanding on the page.
I also don't like that you have to update the catalogs after every SW update, even minor ones. Should be possible to make a file format that stays the same over software versions.
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If you have the newest version of the software, the update process (for Mac at least) is much more straightforward than it used to be. It no longer has to download the whole app again, just an incremental update, from within the app. (If I remember rightly, it is still the old way for Windows, which I assume must be due to some technical reason.)
Ian
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Thanks Ian,
I have the Windows version, and it is still the old way, hope it will be improved soon.
I can get the updates, but since it is a bit tedious, I sometimes don't bother... and I don't feel I need many of the new features that get promoted. Fancy styles, for example, are not for me, I want my photos to look natural.0 -
I don't use styles either.
I am sure that Capture One don't make Windows users use a more long-winded process just out of spite or anything, and that it must therefore be for some technical reason that I don't know about.
However, I think that there will always be features that some of us use, and some of us don't - the ones that matter to you may not be the ones that matter to me.
If you have a subscription, it is definitely worth keeping up to date so that you get bug fixes, but also because some of the new features may prove to be very useful to you. I find that the AI subject mask, for instance, is quite a time saver.
Ian
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I have a subscription, and I'm generally satisfied with Capture One. Chose it over Lightroom when Apple's Aperture went out of business long time ago. I'm sure professionals need different stuff than myself and I'm not against introducing new features. Just sometimes it feels that I'm asked to do updates more often than I would like to, as it is taking some time off editing the photos.
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I just activated my Capture One today. All was good. I close the program and once I open it again, it tells me the version I have is not activated. So I have to reinstall and redo everything again. Am I doing something wrong. And does the activation limit count this? I've reactivated 3 times now. Please help. :(
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The activation limit doesn't count it. What the limit means is that you can only activate it on 3 computers at the same time. If you are in doubt as to how many current activations it thinks you have at the moment, log on to your account and click the button for plans and services management. You should then see something like this.
If what it says about activations isn't what you think is right, click the link that says Show Activation History. You can then deactivate all or any of your computers.
Ian
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