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Smart Album: Limit scope to specific folders

Eric Valk
[quote="cryptochrome" wrote:
Hi guys,

is it possible to limit the scope of a smart album to a specific set of folders in my catalog?

I tried playing with Projects, but it seems I have to manually add photos to the project first before I can apply smart searches on these photos. So that is kind of static. What I actually want is a smart folder that only looks at specified catalog folders, so it updates automatically when new photos are added to those folders.

I'm not sure if you are casually using the word "folders" to mean "collections" or if you specifically meant Capture One's (and Apple's) usage of "folder", which references a group of files managed by the OSX operating system.

The Library of a C1 Catalog refers to Collections, which are groups of images managed by C1 {Album, Project, Group, Smart Album} , the Catalog itself, and Folders which are managed by OSX.
  • All the images in the Catalog's library are in one or more Collections - at least in All Images or in Trash.

  • Every image the Catalog's library also has an image file in a Folder somewhere, unless C1 has lost track of the image file.


The strict answer tou your question (which I think was not your intent) is that Smart Albums can't be tied to Folders. If you try creating a Smart Album inside a Folder, C1 puts the Smart Album in the "User Collections" section and it refers to the entire Library.

The answer you were probably seeking is this:
One way to use C1s Projects and Smart Albums is to group related work inside a Project, by moving the Albums inside the Project. You wouldn't move the individual images (inefficient), you would move the albums. A Smart Album created inside the Project will refers only to the images (in Albums) inside the Project.

You could say that grouping Albums inside a Project is the way for the user to tell C1 about image relationships, and that sets the scope of the Smart Album.

You may want to restructure your Albums somewhat. Keep in mind that an image can be part of many Collections. For example, an image of a Moose from your last expedition can be part of Album "June 2018" in Project "2018 Travels", in Album "Wildlife" in Project "Camping, and in Album "Moose Study" in Project "Wildlife".
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Comments

5 comments

Date Votes
  • Eric Valk
    Hi Crypto

    I think you've stated your concerns and approach quite clearly, now that we both understand what each other mean by Folder and Collection. On

    It seems to me that the workflow supporteed by Capture One Catalogs is poorly matched to your current workflow. Much of the value provided by a Catalog is connected with the use of collections, and you do not wish to use collections.

    I suggest that you try Capture One Sessions. Sessions are based on folders. This is Capture Ones oldest way of working, there is a significant fraction of C1 users that only use sessions. This may be better aligned with your current workflow. A Session starts with a few predefined folders, and then you can add your own or add references to folders not inside the Session Folder into the Session Favorites.

    The tools in the Session, such as Smart Folders and Search, will refer to the Folders, if they are referenced in Favorites.
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  • Eric Valk
    I'm just now doing a little experiment on my MacBook Air. I've addded every folder with images to a session (as a favorite, so the folder and image files are not moved). The session now has 19799 images as favorites, although it contains no images.
    "Import" of the favorites took about 20 minutes, CO is now busy with preview generation, which is going to take a hour or two with only integrated graphics and two i7 cores.

    Advanced search and Filter tool work quite OK across all the favorites.
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  • SFA
    [quote="cryptochrome" wrote:
    Thanks Eric, I appreciate the help.

    I'll reach out to Phase One and place a feature request to allow Smart Albums to filter based on actual folders. I would really like to see this and I am pretty sure a lot of folks who come over from Lightroom and other DAMs, who are all used to this kind of workflow, would appreciate such a feature as well.

    Again, thanks for the help! 😊 At least now I know I wasn't blind and that it is actually not supported.


    Out of interest what are your criteria for the contents of the folder(s) that you wish to treat as an image source?

    Are you importing directly to these folders or pre-processing elsewhere and then moving the images to a folder that you wish to be subjected to the Smart Album functionality?


    Grant
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  • SFA
    Time first then Topic?

    Or Topic then time?

    Time is an automatic filter option in C1 so there is flexibility in using it for selection.

    That said if you are also likely to use other applications making the date part of your file name can be useful. Thus may also be useful for output - helping a client, for example, to know the date of the shot rather than the date of processing when they randomly deposit the image in their systems.

    Topic may not be so automatic but it depends on what you shoot and how you are shooting it.

    Either way one can certainly categorise the images individually of in a shoot as a whole or in sections, quite easily in a number of ways. If making files available to other for commercial or personal use adding Keywords may be the most obvious way since they can be exported with any output files produced and so help the recipient use search facilities in their own systems. Keywords seem to be quite commonly supported, support for other IPTC fields may be a little more erratic application to application. Whatever IPTC fields one might choose to use the important point would be to ensure that all files in the folder has the potential to be identified by the content expected from that type of folder.

    I can understand where you are coming from and why you want to stick with what you know and love. I have a whole stack of archive that works pretty much the same way and was rarely if ever helped by keywords or any other sort of managed metadata. I really wish I had taken the time to do so as it's a task I don't relish now.

    So yes, if I have a need to find something and know the date and likely topic (both can sometimes be a little vague) I may get to it - or close to it - quite quickly. But "Have you got any shots of this in the last 10 years" sort of requests are more challenging. Especially if "this" is a subset of a topic.

    And that's the downside of not working with the full capability of a system, tempting as it may be to stick entirely with what is familiar. These days I more often than not will do at least some basic keywording to augment any file structure image management and naming convention identifiers. It offers much greater flexibility overall.

    Are you images managed within the catalogue or referenced?

    If Managed then any changes made to the folders - position or name for example - could also be checked for and corrected in the Smart Album definitions to keep them up to date.

    If folder and images are Referenced I can envisage some situations where that might not be so easy without adding further administrative steps to the process.

    All of that said, I use sessions not a catalogue so, in effect, my topic (and possibly date) are already defined the session I created for them.

    However for some things I may also have an annual grouping of content by running the session for a year. And I always consider the future potential for aggregating the archive into a single source point - probably a catalogue when the time comes - and how best to achieve that, given that my searches for content are likely to non-hierarchical and across all folder structures in the future.

    Just some thoughts for what they are worth.

    It's still worth going with a feature request but whichever way one looks at is there is some "manual" managing of the files required in a pre-constructed manual folder structure and, were it entirely possible, I would these days try to avoid tying myself in to that at import - but I might still adopt the principle for grouping exports especially if preparing them for external use - on-line for example.

    Grant
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  • OddS.
    [quote="cryptochrome" wrote:
    ...adopting a virtual structure on top of this is very hard for me and I don't even see the reason why someone would want to put another folder-like hierarchy on top of already existing folders. It just doesn't make sense in my view and requires additional steps in the workflow (e.g. always making sure you add photos to collections during import).



    If you have not watched the recorded C1 webinar https://learn.phaseone.com/capture-one/ ... ions-co11/ I suggest you do. If you have already watghed it, I suggest you watch it one more time and pay close attention, especially between webinar time approx 14:30 and 35:00. Don't be put off by that webinar being recorded for C1 version 11.

    I do not think there is a requirement to "always making sure you add photos to collections during import". Collections are handy if you want to limit the scope of smart albums. Name a collection (a project) the same as your disk folder name if that helps, and use smart album "fenced in" by the project boundary. Use show in library/finder/explorer to locate the folder where a raw file resides if you can't tell by the name of the collection.

    Armed with the knowledge from the webinar, you may find a creative solution that works for you.
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