fundamental catalog problem

Here is a simple need.

Travel to a photo shoot. use laptop and external USB drive. Create a catalog on the external drive. Ingest photos from cards to the catalog. Work on the photos.

Come home. Import the catalog into master catalog on desktop machine.

That should be straight forward and a relatively common scenario. It's reasonably easy to achieve with a session instead of a catalog. That's what I'll have to do going forward. But, it should be reasonably easy with a catalog (and there would be some benefits). But there is a serious architectural flaw in the way C1 implements catalogs.

Here is what would appear to be a simple catalog based approach.
1. Come home and copy (using file system) the containing folder of the catalog (and all of its subfolders containing images) to the desktop hard disk.
2. Import the catalog into the master catalog.

Here is what happens, which proves the problem:
If you leave the external disk attached to the desktop machine while you do this it can work. You'll see that even though the copied catalog outer folder is resident LOCALLY on the desktop machine hard disk and you import the LOCAL copy of the catalog, it will show the images as offline. You need to Locate the top level folder on the local machine. Then, C1 fixes the links and all is OK. It really is ok to do this--you just have to remember to copy, keep the external disk attached, import, Locate. Now you can quit C1 and eject the external disk. All "should" be ok.

Let's say instead that after copying everything, you then eject the external disk. Now you open C1 and try to import the LOCAL copy of the folder. Well, you can't. Hah! Why not? Because remember that the local copy of the entire catalog is bound to the external volume (now disconnected). Huh? Catalogs use absolute links that start at the root of the volume the catalog is on. That is a giant error in design. Because of this, you are trying to import a catalog all of whose links are "offline". C1 must have the physical original images in order to generate new previews and thumbs for the destination catalog. But, it doesn't have them because it thinks (INCORRECTLY) that everything is offline because of the absolute paths in the imported catalog (the one copied to the local drive). So, it tries to import, but fails as soon as it tries to access originals.

You can recover from this, too. (Suppose your colleague has retrieved her hard disk and you don't have access to it any more!). Open the LOCAL copy of the copied catalog. (re-)Locate the containing folder--that usually fixes everything. I find that sometimes you need to locate subfolders also. In fact, having tested for the 3rd time you do need to locate each and every LOCAL folder in the copied catalog (while making the file paths in catalogs absolute is by design and not a good design choice, this latter issue just seems like a bug). Now close this catalog. Now, you can import this catalog into your master catalog successfully. Yeah! Phew!

There are three work arounds:
- use sessions (all of the C1 old hands will say this... ...and it's fine to do so). Given the problems with catalogs this is the thing to do;
- or keep the external drive connected while you import and (re-)Locate the catalog--not a big deal if it is your own drive;
- or open the copied catalog and (re-)Locate all of its folders and then import it into the master catalog--a work around for sure but OK if you work carefully.

It's nice to realize what's going on. It is a bit of shame because importing a catalog has some advantages over importing a session--mostly that there are not hundreds or thousands of adjustment side cars left in place in the Settings90 folders of each folder within the imported session. It seems like the import catalog problem and absolute links should be fixed.

Problems like this make C1 seem unnecessarily complicated and prone to seemingly inexplicable problems that hurt the product's reputation (web is full of comments--C1 has a steep learning curve, much harder than LR though raw conversions much better, etc, etc.). It shouldn't be so. It's a fine product and could work as intended with small fixes. As a raw processor and image editor C1 is just great. The file management stuff is still in catchup mode but the extra flexibility of sessions, catalogs, and multiple catalogs open at once are welcome. Just some growing pains to sort out. Frustrating for users as I've spent 12 or so hours sorting out a reliable way to do what I described at the top.

I'm fine for now, now that I realize what I need to do. There were lots of bad symptoms of the problem that I mis-diagnosed. Now I (think) I get it.