Help with honing my file structure...
Hey guys,
I'm posting this in the hopes I can pull on the wisdom of experienced photographers.
I'm trying to clean up my import and file structure within Capture One, as it feels kinda OCD to me, and I wonder whether I'm creating more problems for myself by trying to be too clever. At the moment, I have the entire year created a user collection folders for each month. I will then create a new folder within, say, August, with the filing convention of ddmmyyyy - event name. I then select that new folder, and go to import. I import all my photos from that day into the chosen folder. Ultimately, I could have up to 31 folders within a given month.
It sounds tight, right? My issue, however, is that it feels like it's too overkill, and I'm not really utilising things like keywords, as I never need to go looking for a particular photo.
Why I'm doubting my process, is that I've started to hear a lot about how photographers really just import their photos into Year & Month folders, but use keywords and User Collections to create specific events.
What are your thoughts? Can I tighten up my process a little by not being so OCD about filing structures? Maybe you can share a little of what you do...It would really help me, and may even help people too nervous to ask!
Thanks
I'm posting this in the hopes I can pull on the wisdom of experienced photographers.
I'm trying to clean up my import and file structure within Capture One, as it feels kinda OCD to me, and I wonder whether I'm creating more problems for myself by trying to be too clever. At the moment, I have the entire year created a user collection folders for each month. I will then create a new folder within, say, August, with the filing convention of ddmmyyyy - event name. I then select that new folder, and go to import. I import all my photos from that day into the chosen folder. Ultimately, I could have up to 31 folders within a given month.
It sounds tight, right? My issue, however, is that it feels like it's too overkill, and I'm not really utilising things like keywords, as I never need to go looking for a particular photo.
Why I'm doubting my process, is that I've started to hear a lot about how photographers really just import their photos into Year & Month folders, but use keywords and User Collections to create specific events.
What are your thoughts? Can I tighten up my process a little by not being so OCD about filing structures? Maybe you can share a little of what you do...It would really help me, and may even help people too nervous to ask!
Thanks
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I'm new to Capture One. Long time Aperture user. Starting with a fresh CO Catalog but still struggling with how to organize things so I feel your pain.
Sessions are not for me.
Year/date/month organization is not meaningful to me. I prefer to browse types of images and do not rely heavily on keywords, ratings, smart albums or searches. Basically I want to be able to quickly look at, say, an equestrian event at this location or date. So for me I want an overall project like: "Equestrian" that contains albums like: Camden Eventing 7-16. Or have a project called "Travel" with albums in it like "Italy 2009" or "Charleston Fall 2007". I set the images within the albums to be sorted by date. With this system I can find most things really fast. I have thousands of images but not tens of thousands. If I need to find an image that is a landscape B&W that was taken on vacation and put in the "Vacation" project in the "Beach 2010" album I can usually get to it by memory but if not I can narrow it down with simple limited key word search (landscape, B&W).
This was easy in Aperture. Less so in CO. You pretty much have to use User Collections which is not a big issue except for a few exceptions. I don't like that an image file cannot reside in a "Project" outside of an album. I may have some horse images not associated with an event or place and want to keep them within the "Equestrian" project but not in an album. You can do this in Aperture, but not CO. Also, sorting images within a User Collection has limitations since you cannot completely delete original images from within a User Collection, you can only remove it from the album its in. It remains in the CO Catalog and on your hard drive. You have to go outside of the User Collections to do this. If you are not diligent and do your sorting right away and in a methodical way, the contents of your CO Catalog and your User Collection file structure can end up being very different which leads to images you can't find and lots of junk images left in the CO Catalog.
So, I'm still struggling (an you're right, sometime OCD does not help). I know this does not help you any but maybe gives the Phase One folks some insight into how different people want to do DAM. And for me, DAM is CO's most glaring weak link. When this gets refined I will be very satisfied.0
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