Aperture to C1
I'm slowly trying to move from Aperture to C1 - for performance reasons I had to split my Aperture library into several catalogs - Aperture was fine with one library and about `120,000 pics whereas C1 can not deal with that many pictures - at least that's my impression - so I created yearly catalogs - it's not optimal since I'd loved to search for a certain keyword across all the years - one thing I'm struggling with is setting up "Smart Albums" - is there a way to copy those smart albums across the catalogs - I've setup quite a number of smart albums and it would be a lot of work if I had to recreate them in each and ever yearly catalog.
Thanks in advance for your input.
Thanks in advance for your input.
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I have also done the migration and I do not know of any way to bring across the smart albums directly.
There probably is no direct way.
I copied every smart album and stack to an album in Aperture, then did the migration.
CaptureOne has the feature that smart album rules can be set, and read, by Applescript, this is not possible with Aperture.
If you had fairly standardised rules for your Aperture smart allbums, then an Applescript could be used to recreate them in C1.
Example. In Aperture you have a Smart Album called "Best", which selects images with 4 star or 5 star ratings.
1)Make a list of the rule sets commonly used in your Aperture Smart Albums. Lets say this is rule 4.
2) Copy the images to an Album "Best__SA--Rule4" in the same Project. This can be done by an Applescript, although you as user will have to choose the rule set, since Applescript can't read Aperture smart album rules.
3) Migrate the Aperture Library to a C1 catalog.
4) Use an Apple Script that walks the catalog (i.e. reads a top level catalog, then reads its children, then the childrens children etc) and when it finds an album with a name like "Best__SA--Rule4" (by cheecking if the name contains "__SA--rule") it creates a Smart Album in the same location named "Best" with rule set #4.
I've been doing a lot of Applescript lately with C1, the script for step #4 would be straightforward.0 -
Eric is correct here. Cannot transfer smart folders. Make a folder within Aperture prior to export or copy the rules down somewhere.
Regarding large catalogs. I had two catalogs in Aperture, one for work, one for home. A breeze for Aperture. What I've found with C1 is that a referenced approach is best and I've learned that Sessions are a great way to work. It's very nimble, you can happily import on a laptop and then simply add the session folder to your main HD and Mac when it suits. You can import Sessions when you are ready into Catalogs. Catalogs can refer to years or refer to particular large projects or categories of material. The Catalog will leave the referenced images where they are and take in your edits and so on.
Worth considering how best to approach all this when you are taking on a new piece of software.0 -
Thanks
@Eric - how many pictures did you have in Aperture0 -
I can’t remember exactly, something like 17000 in the main Library.
I now have 16250 in the main catalog, and a few other catalogs of several thousands each
I see from your other postings that you have 120,000. I suggest that initially you break it into sections no larger than 30,000 each.
I also found it valuable to start with a small test library of 1000 - refine the library so that import goes without errors and all desired images and data arrives. With a small library it goes quite fast.
I found I had to modify the Library regarding the following:
- version names —> file names
- hierarchical keywords —> “parent|childâ€
- smart albums —> allbums
- stacks —> albums
- record editing adjustments as keywords
- remove or convert unsupported image formats
- remove audio & video
- capture original import date & time as metadata
Now go back to main library and implement those refinements.
Then make a bigger test library, say 6000. Further refinements, implement those in the main library as well.
Once you are very confident all library refinements are completed, then split the library into sections and make the final import of a section of the library. Be prepared to repeat it if further refinements are needed.0 -
From what I'm reading on the internet incl. this forum I'm afraid I have to take a different approach/workflow - C1 does not seem to be able to handle larger libraries like Aperture did and I don't really want to split up my library into smaller segments unless cross-catalog searching would be supported - if I e.g. search for "Grand Canyon" I'd like to see/get all my pictures of Grand Canyon (just and example) - wonder whether Lightroom would be able to manage this - maybe I have to look into a file based approach? 0 -
Also consider Mylio.Some good comments about this tool and large collections of images. 0 -
My library's got only ~50k images, but so far I don't have performance problems with C1. This might be because:
- I have a simple structure: my referenced C1 library mostly contains synchronized folders. The largest folder has ~10k images.
- I have a few albums
- No smart albums or other constructs, although I've used them in the past.
My rationale is simple: having worried about losing smart albums and some other things when I moved from Aperture, I decided to stick to a simple ("lowest common denominator") library structure so as to minimize the risk of losing application-specific constructs again. I assume that in addition to C1, LR and Aperture, any DAM application should understand on-disk folder structures.
I've also found it useful to painstakingly add metadata to my images. That way I can always find what I want regardless of where I start looking. So for example, I could search for "camel" and find all images of camels regardless of their folder/collection/etc. location. As opposed to if I started in "Zoos", I'd only find camels in zoos, and if I happened to have filed "Denver Zoo camels" under, say, "Colorado", I wouldn't find it by starting in "Zoos" folder. But I'd easily find it if I had tagged the image properly and started my search in the entire library. From my experience, C1 finds things really, really quickly (if not totally accurately),
C1's launch time depends on the size of the last entity accessed when it was closed. For example, C1 takes longer to launch if I was looking in a 10k image folder when I quit, vs if a 500 image folder had been selected. Therefore, I try to remember to select a fairly small folder or collection before quitting C1.
Also, my catalog resides on my boot SSD, while the images are on a hybrid HD (one with a lot of cache that sort of serves as a small smart SSD).0 -
A lot depends on the hardware with C1P, more than Aperture. I have over 57,000 images in my catalog. All are referenced and on a G-Force external USB 3.1 HDD. (loading files from the external HDD was not noticeably different than the internal SSD). I have hundreds of projects within groups and some of the the projects have many albums. Having everything in a single catalog makes finding an image relatively easy, assuming you have annotated each image with appropriate metadata. On a 10core iMac Pro with 64 GB RAM and 2TB SSD, it loads in 25 sec. Time to view all images is less than 25 sec, the first time after loading and a few seconds, thereafter. I have no issues with the speed of adjustments. With my 16GB 8 core 2008 Mac Pro and 2008 dual core 4 GB Macbook Pro, things are much slower. The mac Book Pro takes over 4 min to load the same catalog and the Mac Pro takes 65 sec. Initially loading all images is too long (over an hour) to attempt on the MacBook Pro and about 4 min on the Mac Pro.
So, not surprising, if you have a slow machine and searching through all of your images is not a priority, you can get along quite nicely, but with smaller catalogs. If you want to do a search, having a single catalog is much easier to use, but as your catalog gets larger, your hardware needs to be more robust.0 -
I got the latest MacBook Pro with 16gb, 3.1 ghz - what kind of surprises me is tha a software that is several years old (Aperture) seems to be more efficient and stable than c1 - I actually imported all the yearly libraries into c1 - however the beachball shows for hours and usually when I get up in the morning the computer is shut down - I’m obviously unable to create the previews - several times I got a pop up telling me that the system is running out of resources - never had something like this before.
Thanks again for your input0 -
Is the beachball spinning because C1's busy creating previews for all of your images? It took C1 (v8) overnight to finish whatever it did when importing my entire library, but after it was done, the program worked just fine. Since then I've upgraded to v9, v10 and now v11 and performance has improved with each successive version. You've really got to give C1 time to ingest your Aperture work. 0 -
[quote="Nature Isme" wrote:
Is the beachball spinning because C1's busy creating previews for all of your images? It took C1 (v8) overnight to finish whatever it did when importing my entire library, but after it was done, the program worked just fine. Since then I've upgraded to v9, v10 and now v11 and performance has improved with each successive version. You've really got to give C1 time to ingest your Aperture work.
There is nothing I can do if it crashes the whole computer and shuts it off0 -
[quote="mmjaeger" wrote:
[quote="Nature Isme" wrote:
Is the beachball spinning because C1's busy creating previews for all of your images? It took C1 (v8) overnight to finish whatever it did when importing my entire library, but after it was done, the program worked just fine. Since then I've upgraded to v9, v10 and now v11 and performance has improved with each successive version. You've really got to give C1 time to ingest your Aperture work.
There is nothing I can do if it crashes the whole computer and shuts it off
I had this experience in CO 8, but not by CO 10.
When I did see it, I watched the activity monitor, and found that Capture One was using an increasing amount of memory and when it got very larger it crashed the Mac. This happened even before creating previews. But I have not seen this in CO 11.
I now have a late 2015 iMac, with 24GB of RAM and i7, it doesn't seem so different from your MacBoook, except a little faster (but not a lot). I did have a 2009 iMac with 16GB of RAM and an i5, this worked but was rather slow.
Importing large Aperture libraries requires a little care but should not be as difficult as you are experiencing.
Can you provide some data:- how big is your yearly library (how many images, how many GB)
- are the images referenced or managed
- are the image files on the main drive or an external drive or on a NAS
- How much room is left on the main drive
- Does the new catalog go on the main drive or on some attached drive
- what kind of image files are to be imported
- are any of the image files over 100MB
- are there any special image file types (from scanners, products of other photo software)
- are there any monochrome images
- do your images have many metadata fields filled
- do you have any metadata fields where the value is unique for every image file
- do you run any antivirus during the import
- how many keywords do you have
- how deep are the keywords nested
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@Eric:
We're talking about 16 libraries ranging from 104MB up to 9.3GB - there are two libraries that have about 22,000 pics init it - all the others have less than 10,000 or even way less than that - pics are all references and are stored on a LaCie 2big 6TB HD connected using usb-c/thunderbolt 3.
the new catalog I'm trying to create is on the internal SSD drive. all files are jpeg files from a variety of Sony cams - no antivirus is running - keywords are not nested - all flat keywords
Thanks again for replying0 -
[quote="mmjaeger" wrote:
@Eric:
We're talking about 16 libraries ranging from 104MB up to 9.3GB - there are two libraries that have about 22,000 pics init it - all the others have less than 10,000 or even way less than that - pics are all references and are stored on a LaCie 2big 6TB HD connected using usb-c/thunderbolt 3.
the new catalog I'm trying to create is on the internal SSD drive. all files are jpeg files from a variety of Sony cams - no antivirus is running - keywords are not nested - all flat keywords
Thanks again for replying
Everything you mention seems quite OK, no red flags.
Of these libraries, can you describe the ones that cause a crash on import? All of them, the two largest or ...?
How much unused disk space is on that internal SSD?
Is the Lacie 2big setup in RAID1?0
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