COP Session Files after importing in master catalog

Jochen Beck

• July 16, 2019 21:24

If I want to integrate a session into my master catalog, I move the folder containing my session of interest to its target destination, then use the import session function in COP12. The image import itself works as it should. However, by doing so -in addition to my photographs- all of COP´s session files (the stuff inside the "...\Capture\CaptureOne" folder) remain on my harddrive. There are, for example, 550 raw images in my latest session but there are more than 2000 files in the session folder. The extra files comprise ~550 settings files ("Settings120" subfolder), 550 files in the "Thumbnails" subfolder and ~1100 files in the "Proxies" subfolder.
After sucessfully importing the session into my catalog, can I erase all these extra files, or are they still required?

FYI: after importing into the catalog, I do not need to access the session itself any longer.

Thank you and kind regards,
J

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  Ian Wilson

  Moderator

  • July 17, 2019 07:44

  

  It is normal behaviour for Capture One to leave the extra stuff such as settings, thumbnails and proxies where it found them. But it re-creates these inside the catalog. So if you are short of space you could delete them (so for instance you could delete the whole Capture One subfolder inside your Selects folder, just leaving the actual raw files). However, when I started using a master catalog and importing images from my sessions, I decided to leave the sessions intact. After importing the images into the catalog, it is good practice to only make further modifications to the images using the catalog, and not touch them again via the session (because any further edits you make in the session will not be reflected in the catalog). But I was new to Catalogs, and not entirely confident that my catalog might go all wrong, get corrupted etc. So I decided to leave the subfolders intact, so that I could resurrect the sessions if needed. I am not so short of space that it is a huge hit on my storage. (It was probably an unnecessary precaution, but it is the practice I have stuck with.)
  
  By the way, there is an alternative to importing the whole session into the catalog. What I generally do is just import the images from the Selects and Output folders. I think that if images haven't made it from Capture to Selects by the time I add them to the catalog, they don't need to be added. And there seems no point in adding the contents of the session trash either.
  
  Ian

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  Jochen Beck

  • July 23, 2019 12:32

  Thank you Ian.
  
  These are some good thoughts you shared.
  The waste of disk space is but one aspect. I was actually more concerned about the high file count during backup, which unneccearily slows down the process (well..., at least over time when you have accumulated tens of thousands of dead previews and proxies).
  Partly, I was wondering about this behaviour because when you import a (small) catalog into your master catalog you get the option to relocate the raw files to a new destination. I suppose for the way I got used to work now, it might be more straightforward to create a catalog each time instead of a session per shoot.
  
  Cheers.
  J

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