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How to convert workflow to C1 from a folders structure

mcphoto
Hi everyone!

after various months using C1 I'm now comfortable with it and I'm seriously considering to switch my entire workflow to C1 instead of LR that it is still handling the "Catalogue".

I've already tried the option of the LR Catalogue import function but frankly speaking it's not working for large catalogues (mine it's approximately 60.000 pics and even after many many trials it always crash during import).

At present the LR catalogue points to a folders structure very clean and simple. For certain works I've year folders (starting from 2003) for others the folders are location based since I do a lot of landscape photography in my area and I'm not too much interested in the date of the shots but instead it's important for me the region and city/town/location of them. Yes... in the past I could have started with tag but I preferred to rely on files position inside specific folders (in example "Europe>Italy>Tuscany>Florence") in order to be free to switch platform whenever I want/need.

My ideal solution would have the possibility to keep all the originals in the iMac (where I also handle the backups) but with the possibility to easily carry around a catalogue with previews on the MBP when I need to select/show/compare on the way... or sometime also some originals.

Now:

1- I like the concept of the Sessions to keep everything in one place, it gives me a sense of order.... but I think it doesn't work when I ask for a portable catalogue with preview and possibility to select and rate that sync when back... am I wrong?

2- I think catalogue is best solution but I'm scared for the reliability of this recent function that seems to still have some problems with large number of photos...

3- I could work on "open session" leaving C1 to create his sub-folder when requested... but in this way I don't have portable catalogue and I loose the search capability over all the photos... (

Sorry to have been so long or to have complicated to much something that would be easy and thank in advance for any help and suggestion!

Kind regards
Massimo
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Comments

10 comments

Date Votes
  • Permanently deleted user
    I am glad I am not the only having difficulty with the transition to CO7.
    The many options avaialable are paralyzing and wading through the many videos/tutorials leave me feeling stupid - even though I have using computers since 1982 (DOS, Xenix, UNix) etc.

    I would like a very simple step by step work flow that allow me to retain my existing client/folder and backup process, but gets me through the initial CO7 steps of importing and setting up a style (to allow dust referencing etc.)

    I am not a large volume company and I suspect the majority of photographers are like me?

    sean
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  • SFA
    Have both of you looked at the recent videos from Adrian Weinbrecht as part of the C1 support offering?

    He uses Sessions rather than Catalogues and offers a workflow that clearly works for him and his team.

    What surprised me is that it is, except for a few details, the same basic workflow I have slowly come to adopt. The difference are not very consequential except where out typical shooting needs and volumes diverge - and they are very different even though the basic process and flow is almost identical.

    I was quite surprised to be honest. I had not in any way expected my way of working to be even similar to that of a leading Pro although it works well for me.

    Massimo, I don't feel a need to use catalogues but I can see certain benefits though I am not convinced that having an entire catalogue of all images on the road with me is entirely necessary. However out need may vary.

    Have a sort of catalogue of historic work, all quickly accessible might have some advantages - but do you really need to be able to attempt to edit it on the road? One thing I have considered is to catalogue just the output jpgs, not the entire output of my life at RAW level.

    That would give me rapid access to a sample file should anyone ask. It would be a relatively small database file. In theory one could play with some editing for the jpg on the road if it was really required to do so - enough to show a potential client what might be possible perhaps. It would also provide me with a link or at least a file name to get back to the original file quickly when (or maybe if) needed.

    Of course, our needs may differ.


    Sean,

    The Weinbracht videos are a reasonable starting point. They are not overly complex. They deal with sessions and that sounds like the sort of approach that would suit you well.

    C1 can look a bit daunting at first but actually you can pick and choose the stuff that works for you on your situation and file the rest for future reference as and when (and if) needed.

    Imports are very simple if you don't fight them. I write from experience. I spent months diving in and doing stuff without feeling comfartable (V5 days) despite coming from an application that was extremely similar in its working - or so I found out when I stood back and looked and took a little time to work it out.

    My usual input is so varied a style is unlikely to work for me. Likewise I have never found it neccessary or especially beneficial to consider dealing with dust at the time of import. I guess is you are mostly shooting in ways and circmstances where dust is a regular problem it would make sense to do something about it at impott time. Otheriwse it may be something where you just shoot a dust test image from time to time during the shoot , leave that in the imports and then use it when required - usually a combination of image content, lens and aperture. Bear in mnd if you change lenses or on a self cleaning system switch on and off frequently the dust pattern may change during a shoot ... but I expect you have already though of that.

    I seem to remember there are some tutorials or maybe an Image Professor's blog post that deal with this sort of subject.

    When I find I have a serie of images adversely affect by dust in some way I just correct for one of them and then copy and apply the corrections to the others. That may or may not work well for you - I cannot know. But it works for me.

    HTH.


    Grant Perkins
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  • Permanently deleted user
    Thank you for the kind, gentle, and encouraging response - the fact that you were struggling for months gives me courage to keep at it after struggling just few weeks.

    I will take your advice and follow up on the videos.

    my thanks
    sean
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  • mcphoto
    Hi Grant,

    First thank you very much for your detailed reply.

    Yes, I have seen the great video made by Adrian and I had also exchanged some comments on the blog. He gave me the idea to use sessions for my "geographical" archive (never ended sessions in reality) with one session for each region or area with sub folders inside divided for each town/city within that area. That's fine.

    But, practically: I have to visit a customer next week who is interested to make a 2014 calendar with photos of his town (a beautiful town called Asolo). I have a good amount of material for this. Now it is all inside Europe>Italy>Veneto>Asolo folder. I will go to his office with my MBP and I would like to be able to bring my session (or catalogue?) with me with the possibility to select and rate images (I don't need to edit) so when I will be back to the studio I can work on selections and produce what requested. I would like to be ready for any need with all my catalogue on the MBP. Good quality preview are enough since I can't take always with me TB of pics. Should I consider Media Pro? But really I would prefeer to stay within C1.
    I think the use of catalogs is the best solution (LR works very smoothly in this sense) but I have fear to use this functionality at the moment, for the reasons explained previously. But with sessions I understand I can't achieve the result I need in the above practical example. Then... What to do?

    Thanks again,
    Massimo
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  • SFA
    [quote="NNN635120411491826040" wrote:
    Thank you for the kind, gentle, and encouraging response - the fact that you were struggling for months gives me courage to keep at it after struggling just few weeks.

    I will take your advice and follow up on the videos.

    my thanks
    sean


    Hi Sean,

    I'm sure the videos will help to put the process into perspective.

    I think in my case I just assumed that C1 was the same as the other converter/editor I use and had been using for a while because the basic 'session' style of working (No catalogues back in C1 5 and C1 6) was extremely similar. What I missed was how much more C1 could offer. It's not that I needed all of it and even now there's a lot I don't feel a need to use for my approach. The problem was that it was there, I had not really thought through what I needed and what I did not need (most of the time) so there remained this nagging feeling that I really had not 'got' it. Which was not actually true although there is much to keep discovering and the various regular feeds from Phase are usefully thought provoking in that respect - or so I find.

    One of the things I found fairly early on was that, for my images with my equipment at least, I didn't have to to do much to get a good result. Stuff just seemed to look right. My other editor, though a little old now, can still produce some great results out of the box but not quite as complete as often as C1, or so it seems to me. On the other hand for some really tricky files it offers some features that, as far as I know, are still pretty unique in the marketplace so sometime I edit in both - which is made very easy because they both fit within the "session concept" and I can run them side by side in the same folder structures without much need to manage them to keep things apart. Well, now I understand more I can. Before I tried a little too hard and didn't need to.

    I should have paid more attention to the videos that were around at the time ...

    Good luck and enjoy the learning experience and what it will allow you to do.


    Grant Perkins
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  • Permanently deleted user
    You guys are so damn nurturing 😊 Love it.

    CO7 is surely the most precise editor I have used to date and it squeezes out the best an image can be - I have no problem with the engine. It is the front end I am impatient with. I should say in full disclosure that I currently have two large projects to process and am doing them with CO7 straight out of the box. The results are stunning and make me look really smart and even more clever in my ability to produce stellar product.

    I know it was daring to learn CO7 'on the job' and 'on the run' and perhaps my initial comments were unfair.

    I will be patient when these two gigs are over and will take the time, with some good coffee in the morning and good wine in the afternoon, and slowly absorb the concepts in CO7's import process.

    My thanks to all of you for taking the time for me.
    sean
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  • SFA
    [quote="mcphoto" wrote:
    Hi Grant,

    First thank you very much for your detailed reply.

    Yes, I have seen the great video made by Adrian and I had also exchanged some comments on the blog. He gave me the idea to use sessions for my "geographical" archive (never ended sessions in reality) with one session for each region or area with sub folders inside divided for each town/city within that area. That's fine.

    But, practically: I have to visit a customer next week who is interested to make a 2014 calendar with photos of his town (a beautiful town called Asolo). I have a good amount of material for this. Now it is all inside Europe>Italy>Veneto>Asolo folder. I will go to his office with my MBP and I would like to be able to bring my session (or catalogue?) with me with the possibility to select and rate images (I don't need to edit) so when I will be back to the studio I can work on selections and produce what requested. I would like to be ready for any need with all my catalogue on the MBP. Good quality preview are enough since I can't take always with me TB of pics. Should I consider Media Pro? But really I would prefeer to stay within C1.
    I think the use of catalogs is the best solution (LR works very smoothly in this sense) but I have fear to use this functionality at the moment, for the reasons explained previously. But with sessions I understand I can't achieve the result I need in the above practical example. Then... What to do?

    Thanks again,
    Massimo


    Massimo,

    I understand your challenge. I have considered something similar myself.

    I see it like this.

    A catalogue, basically and for now not thinking about it as a store for everything like a type of Media Pro, is a flat archive that allows you to keep everything in one place and find it using keywords and tags of various types. A benefit might be that it is one file to manage and backup and take with you. A negative is that it might be a very large file and in most cases you will never need more than a small part of it at one point in time. You also must tag and keyword everything to make it work well for you. That can be a big task and is not always accurate. Try random searches on any commercial web site to see how well they are maintaining their keywords!

    A session, as you have it structured is easily identified without a lot of searching. It is likely to be a smaller set of files than the entire catalogue database (assuming that you can keep the original files separate in both when travelling). However you may not have everything with you when an unexpected opportunity to present your work arises. (Unless you have internet access to a cloud account of course ... but that is an different discussion.)

    Now, a session is very flexible and can contain any folder you choose to include in it, although I would guess there are some technical limits to that. So there is nothing to stop you having a session for a town, another session that includes all the towns in an area, another that contains all the towns in a region and then a country and so on. You could do the same for a year in a different session. The session database would than be acting in a way similar to a catalogue.. There would be a little work to maintain the sessions as new material is added or some removed maybe. Or you could just create a session for a particular project - like your meeting about the calendar.

    So in theory there are way that you couold take a hierarchical folder structure and make super-sessions that would allow access to the contents in different ways for different purposes so emulating the benefits of a catalogue but without the potentially large file to manage.

    One thing I have briefly tried, mainly for presenting to potential customers as you have described, is to deal with each shoot or event or, in your case perhaps, each town as a session (or sessions) and produce the sample files you wish to show (probably as jpgs?) and then put those in a catalogue for portability. Or a session would also be possible and give you the option make selections, crops, perhaps minor examples of edits, and save those ready for tracing back to the original files for the final preparation. I am assuming the the file names would be carried forward but if you simply re-connect your 'roadshow' device to your office systems I would imagine the links to the source files would be readily available. Whether you were using a session or a catalogue probably would not make much difference at that point.

    It appears to me that the biggest problem (for my needs) is not whether I can do something but which is the best way to do it.

    I mostly shoot events so often I have several thousand images of several hundred potential customers over a day or several days. The Keywording effort to deal with people in images is huge - not just adding the keyword (quite easy in C1) but finding the information and then the image files for each person. But I suspect that to work effectively in a catalogue would need that keywording work to be done whereas to some extent leaving things in sessions means that keywords are less important as long as people who might be interested in the images can remember which event they attended.

    Where that is fails is when someone asks for images across a range of possible events over several years - but then you have to consider the trade off between the time a 'search on demand' activity takes and how much effort you may make to keyword everything only to find that nobody asks for the things you have encoded.

    I assume that none of this is a big consideration for a large studio or photo agency. They can just allocate staff to the task!

    I hope to experiment more with these ideas heading into next year. I would be very interested to hear about your experiences if you do the same. However the thought of going back several years and trying to work all of that into a new method has little appeal for me so it may be that it only becomes a 'going forward' project.

    I hope my thoughts are of some interest. It seems that they are much the same as Adrian's - a co-incidence I am sure.


    Grant Perkins
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  • mcphoto
    Dear Grant,

    what to say? THANK YOU !!

    I've really appreciated the deep reply received and it has clarified better the concept of Session. Day by day I'm deciding to try seriously the Sessions instead of the Catalogue, also because recents trials with them I've seen they are still very problematic and seems that Catalogue feature is still a very early beta in C1, specially with large number of photos that's frankly speaking the real meaning to use Catalogue in my opinion.
    It would be really really useful if the Session file (.cosession) would work as a "small catalogue", I mean it would be possible to copy this file to have at least the file preview with you to allow rating, color-label and keywords on the go with sync with originals when re-connected back. But my first trials in this sense doesn't work, is it possibile I'm doing something wrong? If I disconnect the originals the Session simply show a question mark in place of miniatures, without possibility to look at previews.
    If I will solve this point I'm ready to fully switch! I could proceed as below:

    1) I keep my folders structure as it is (in example: Europe>Tuscany>Florence) and I create the Sessions for each "macro area" I need (in above example "Tuscany" would be good, with various towns inside in sub-folders).

    2) When I have new photos for an area I simply put them in appropriate folder and consequently also in appropriate Session

    3) If I need to bring "catalogue" (sorry I don't want to create confusion... I mean "photo catalogue" and not C1 Catalogue) with me I just copy the .cosession file to show photos previews, then I work over it for rating/labels/etc. and when back I overwrite the old one

    I fear that point 3) will not work as hoped but if it works, or if exist a way to get it work... I'm done 😊 !!!

    Thank you very much once again for your very kind support,

    Ciao,
    Massimo
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  • SFA
    Hello Massimo,

    Thanks you for your kind words. I am delighted to hear that you have been able to make some progress with sessions.

    I think your ideas for your point 3 are excellent and would indeed make the session quite similar to the intended functionality of a catalogue. Whether that is possible, technically, I don't know. Whether it is desirable, commercially from Phase One's point of view, I don't know either.

    I wonder if there might be some way to make use of sidecar files for this purpose but I do not currently use them so it is outside may usable knowledge area.

    If you are only looking for colour tagging and ratings based on a client requirement for a limited number of selected files you might be able to work with preprocessed output files to collect the information and then simply transfer the settings (even manually if the number of selections is relatively small) to re-process, if that is what you do, from the original files.

    However if you are also cropping, adjusting colours and making other edits then that would not be a very practical way forward and I think you would need to consider how you make the catalogue functionality work for you when on the road.

    Realistically I have difficulty seeing how one can make any effective edit changes (other than ratings, colour codes, keywords/meta data and perhaps setting up a crop) without access to the original file. (Or at least a file that you consider to be an original for the purpose - perhaps a jpg processed form the original file for example.)

    Does Media Pro offer anything that might work for you when travelling. (Another product that I am not familiar with, sorry.)

    Another thought that occurs to me is that if you make changes (of any type) to the edits for a particular file to suit one customer you may not want those specific changes to write back to the master session (or C1 catalogue!).

    To get around that I suppose the most obvious approach would be either to create a customer specific session (or catalogue) at some point or to have the personal discipline to use variants for the edits. However it is easy to forget to apply this idea sometimes and I'm not sure there would be a way to guarantee that you could identify which variant belonged to which client if such identification is necessary. Keywording is the natural way to approach that but there may be better options.

    An option to be able to merge variants with previous edits in a 'master' file could be interesting but I suspect that people would point to a catalogue to perform such a role. Merging colour and rating into a sidecar file might be a limited but more realistic option.

    Of course someone else may already have a way of dealing with exactly the same requirement you have so let us hope they find this thread. I too would be interested to hear of a good approach to the challenge even though my perceived needs might be a little different to yours.

    I'll follow this thread to see where it leads us.

    Have fun.


    Grant Perkins
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  • mcphoto
    Hi Grant,

    thanks again for your feedback.

    I'm not interested to do big or small developments on the files that I take with me on the way but I just need of rating and colors tag. Unfortunately it seems not possible, I've done various tests but the preview files are inside CaptureOne subfolder located inside the folder that contains originals RAWs, and without these files... no preview. It means it would be very complicated and time spending to manually export on laptop the Session file + locate and copy in *same relative position* the preview files.... simply no-sense works.

    I hope somebody look at this thread with some other advices / ideas, in the meantime thank you again for the kind help.

    Kind regards
    Massimo
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