Importing Lightroom Catalog problem
Hey there.
I got a question considering switching from Lightroom to C1.
On Lightroom I have been working with ONE Catalog for several years now. It's almost 2Gb big. In this catalog I have stored many photo series/projects/jobs (around 180.000 photos) which are physically located on at least 10 different hard drives. They are simply sorted by the hard-drives they are physically on/from where I have directly imported them. No special file structure. When I need to work on an older series from last year let's say, I simply need to connect the hard-drive the photos are on, and without switching catalogs I can just work on the photos of the series.
I then have imported this main Lightroom catalog to C1 and noticed that it doesn't import photos that are "offline". So basically, since I can only connect 2-3 hard drives at a time, I am not able to import my Lightroom catalog in a complete state, because it will not import all the photos of the other 8-7 hard drives.
What am I supposed to do here?
I got a question considering switching from Lightroom to C1.
On Lightroom I have been working with ONE Catalog for several years now. It's almost 2Gb big. In this catalog I have stored many photo series/projects/jobs (around 180.000 photos) which are physically located on at least 10 different hard drives. They are simply sorted by the hard-drives they are physically on/from where I have directly imported them. No special file structure. When I need to work on an older series from last year let's say, I simply need to connect the hard-drive the photos are on, and without switching catalogs I can just work on the photos of the series.
I then have imported this main Lightroom catalog to C1 and noticed that it doesn't import photos that are "offline". So basically, since I can only connect 2-3 hard drives at a time, I am not able to import my Lightroom catalog in a complete state, because it will not import all the photos of the other 8-7 hard drives.
What am I supposed to do here?
0
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The only thing I think about : connect one or two of your HDD at a time, import the pictures therein, disconnect them, connect others, etc... If you worked with your RAW folders of your HDD when using LR, it will be the same with C1. You can work offline with C1 in the same way as with LR.
The only problem you might have is the management of such a huge number of images in your catalog.
Robert0 -
I see a couple of options.
A) I assume that your drives are likely USB. The older ones likely USB 2.0, the newer ones USB 3.0. One can buy USB hubs with up to 10 ports for relatively little money. With a 6 port USB 2.0 hub and a 5 port USB3.0 hub you should be able to connect all of your drives.
B) I observe that 180,000 image files, even if they average 30MB each, is about 5.4TB.
Those 5-10 year old drives are likely not that big, and are possibly getting a bit elderly and posing a bit of risk.
It might be reasonable to buy one 6TB desktop drive (now relatively inexpensive) and move (actually copy) the image folders (not files) from the old drives to the one drive. In this way you would not change the sorting of the image files, they are simply stored in a different location. (keep the old drives as insurance)
My experience is that Capture One doesn't care how many folders you have.
This could easily be done with Capture One, and I assume in Lightroom. If you do this with Lightroom/Capture One, the advantage is that the tool knows where the files are immediately after you move them.
If you do this with OSX, then when you start Lightroom/Capture One, you have to show the tool where the files are now. Capture One has a Locate tool in the Files part of the Library, and I guess that Lightroom has something similar.0 -
[quote="Eric Nepean" wrote:
It might be reasonable to buy one 6TB desktop drive (now relatively inexpensive) and move (actually copy) the image folders (not files) from the old drives to the one drive. In this way you would not change the sorting of the image files, they are simply stored in a different location. (keep the old drives as insurance)
My experience is that Capture One doesn't care how many folders you have.
Yes Eric.
The problem is that I am not sure Capture One would be able to import 180,000 images in one step without any damage.
I switched from Lightroom to Capture One about 4 years ago and had some troubles when importing my Lightroom catalogue of only 15,000 images : it took a long, long time (a full night) and not all the pictures were imported. I had to go fishing those which weren't.
The solution to import the images disk by disk is less risky, to my mind, even it looks more acrobatic at first glance.
Robert0 -
Hi Robert
You have a point, although Capture One Importing is much better than it used to be.
I think that it was June of 2015 when I first imported my Aperture Library into Capture One 8, and had to do it in blocks of 4000 images, that each took a very long time.
As a test run I recently imported the entire (old) Aperture Library into Capture One v 12, and it was fast and it executed quite nicely. And I have heard of people importing over 100,000 images.
But 180,000 images is quite a lot of images.
In my experience the tricky issues are:
- What to do about keywords
- What do about smart albums
-What about unsupported files
-What about video and audio files
- Are there IPTC metadata fields that will slow down Capture One's Filter Tool (and all of Capture One if Filter Tool is running)
These problems are best solved in smaller incremental batches.0 -
[quote="Eric Nepean" wrote:
Hi Robert
I think that it was June of 2015 when I first imported my Aperture Library into Capture One 8, and had to do it in blocks of 4000 images, that each took a very long time.
As a test run I recently imported the entire (old) Aperture Library into Capture One v 12, and it was fast and it executed quite nicely. And I have heard of people importing over 100,000 images.
You might be right. Actually, I imported my Lightroom library about the same time you did from Aperture. The Capture One DAM has improved subsequently with the last versions, and it is likely that import issues, if any, would be much less drastic than before.
Robert0 -
[quote="marcokd" wrote:
I then have imported this main Lightroom catalog to C1 and noticed that it doesn't import photos that are "offline". So basically, since I can only connect 2-3 hard drives at a time, I am not able to import my Lightroom catalog in a complete state, because it will not import all the photos of the other 8-7 hard drives.
What am I supposed to do here?
Some of my experience might help: viewtopic.php?f=52&t=27207#p130622
In your case you can create a temporary LR catalog from the currently connected dives (filter out the unsupported files if any) and then import that into C1. That way you can see that all is well for those files.
Rinse and repeat until all your files are in C1.0
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