management/organization of raw files

charles kasler

• September 15, 2017 18:01

Hi (again) & thanks for ongoing support from this forum!

I haven't been saving my raw files...just to conserve space & also I thought once I have processed an image, It's done. However I find that later I wish I had done something differently as I improve my skills. I can still edit the jpeg but options are limited & quality will eventually suffer.

I'm an amateur...sorry if this is a dumb question but I'm not sure of the best way to manage raw files. I don't want to save all of them - just the best images. I can't export raw so it seems like my options are to drag to the same folder as the corresponding jpeg, or have a dedicated folder just for raw. At this point I am just storing everything on my hard drive.
Is there a better solution? Thanks.

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  Ian Wilson

  Moderator

  • September 15, 2017 18:37

  

  There are obviously a lot of options. But what I do is I work in Sessions, and I go with the standard session folder setup that Capture One provides (though you can do it differently). So I import raw files into the Capture folder, try to select just the best ones and they go to the Selects folder. Output jpgs go in the Output folder. After a while, once I am fairly sure I don't want them, I delete the remaining contents of the Capture Folder (and empty the Trash). I try to be fairly ruthless. I start a new Session every season, plus extra ones for holidays, etc. I end up with about 10 sessions a year. (Just an amateur too.) Sometimes I revisit an old session and delete a few more because I end up wondering why I thought I wanted to keep some of them!
  
  I do find it useful to still keep old raws. Sometimes if I look back on something from a few years ago, I find that I can reprocess it better than before partly because Capture One may have better features than it had back in an older version, and partly because I have learned new skills.
  
  I have moved sessions that are more than a couple of years old to an external hard drive, but I can work on them there perfectly well.
  
  Others may have other approaches.
  
  Ian

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  charles kasler

  • September 15, 2017 18:53

  Thanks Ian. I work in sessions also...I'll give some thought to yr workflow. I've never quite understood smart albums, etc. The book seems to make a basic feature unnecessarily complex.
  I do realize i can quickly lose my objectivity when editing a batch of images...ear fatigue they call it in music. Not sure what the visual equivalent is called.

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