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Moving from Lightroom - importing large catalog

Thomas Nanos
New C1 user here, making the jump from Lightroom. I have a rather large LR catalog - about 620k photos and the lrcat file is about 6.5GB - and I tried importing into a new C1 catalog. It gets the count correct, and starts chewing through them. At a bit more than 27,000 imported, it just quits and says "Import complete" with a dialog showing the number imported at 27k and change, and that's it. Are there any options beyond splitting the LR catalog into smaller bits (which would take forever), or is C1 simply unable to import such a large data set.

I also tried to import a small portion of my filesystem (a hierarchical folder structure - not from a LR catalog), and C1 parsed the directory structure, finding all the files (20,501), but it's been stuck at 128 of 20501 for a couple hours now, pegging the CPU at 100% (all four cores) but apparently doing nothing.

I'd love to make the switch 100% to C1, but so far my experience hasn't been all that warm-n-fuzzy...any help/advice would be appreciated!

Thanks
-Tom
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Comments

8 comments

Date Votes
  • Luke Miller
    My experience importing a Lightroom catalog is similar to yours. I was successful in importing a subset of my Lightroom catalog, but was disappointed with the limited data that transferred and felt further efforts were a waste of time. What I do is use Lightroom as my DAM. Everything gets imported into Lightroom and keyworded. For Processing I import again into C1, which imports much faster than Lightroom. This works for me since I subscribe to the full Adobe Creative Cloud, so I have access to the latest version of Lightroom whether I use it or not.

    If I did not have a subscription that included Lightroom I would just have two catalogs, with the Lightroom catalog containing the images prior to moving to C1 and the C1 catalog containing those after the move. I would also consider a dedicated DAM application that would inventory all my images. What I found is that anytime I republish and older image I will re-process it. I am more experienced and the software is much better than when I processed it initially.
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  • Ian Leslie
    I had a similar experience. For me I have 1/10th the number of photos but same thing happened to me - import got the expected count and started chewing through them and said it was done but it certainly was not.

    At any rate I was able to get the import to work after I created a LR catalogue with just the images that C1 can actually deal with. I wrote about it here:

    viewtopic.php?f=52&t=27207#p130622
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  • Thomas Nanos
    Thanks for the replies!

    @IanL - interesting...I just did what you outlined in your other post - exported a catalog from LR with only master files and excluded DNGs - seems to be importing fine right now. It's up to about 12,000 out of 616,091. I guess I'll find out in a few hours if it was successful or not...
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  • Ian Leslie
    [quote="TNanos" wrote:
    Thanks for the replies!

    @IanL - interesting...I just did what you outlined in your other post - exported a catalog from LR with only master files and excluded DNGs - seems to be importing fine right now. It's up to about 12,000 out of 616,091. I guess I'll find out in a few hours if it was successful or not...


    So its been a few hours 😊 - did it work?
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  • Thomas Nanos
    [quote="IanL" wrote:
    [quote="TNanos" wrote:
    Thanks for the replies!

    @IanL - interesting...I just did what you outlined in your other post - exported a catalog from LR with only master files and excluded DNGs - seems to be importing fine right now. It's up to about 12,000 out of 616,091. I guess I'll find out in a few hours if it was successful or not...


    So its been a few hours 😊 - did it work?


    Eh, not exactly. 😊

    I tried the monolithic approach of exporting the entire catalog, without virtual copies or DNGs, and it seemed to be working fine. At about 30% complete, it was using most of my system RAM (24GB), and slowed to a crawl. After killing the process, and restarting C1, it would sit on the splash screen for hours, with hard drive access at 100% the entire time. Killed it again, deleted the catalogs, uninstalled C1 and reinstalled fresh (also installed the 11.0.1 update). Decided to carve up my LR catalog into year-long exports. Going OK so far - 2005-2010 are imported now (approx 180,000 photos), with 2011 going now (~48k photos). Seems to be going OK so far - I do have to restart C1 after each import completes. It seems something hangs in the background that prevents me from doing another import (menu option greyed out). Shut it down gracefully, restart and it seems good with the next import. One thing I'm noticing is the shutdown/startup is getting longer each time I import (sometimes up to 2-3 minutes with HD activity pegged at 100%). I've got a funny feeling that C1 can't handle larger catalogs, but I'm holding out hope. Plan B will be to use LR ad my Import/DAM and C1 as my critical editing. I really love the output that I'm seeing reprocessing some older RAWs - heads and shoulders above LR, but the library just seems to be lacking for anything beyond a few thousand photos.

    Crossing my fingers after the import is finished, things stabilize and I can actually use one solution for my workflow...
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  • Tonyh-s
    I found the same, C1 is hopeless with large catalogues on Windows. I actually use Photoshop elements as my DAM and C1 to process the raw files. Seems to work well for me once I got used to using 2 programs rather than 1.
    Tony
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  • Ian Leslie
    [quote="TNanos" wrote:
    Eh, not exactly. 😊


    Rats. I suppose with your catalogue being 10 times bigger than mine your experience would be slower. Sucks that C1 seems to use so much memory. I have one other thing that you might run into then. After I finished my 60 000 image catalogue conversation I clicked on the all images collection and the lights dimmed while it churned through all the images. I was able to just click on any other folder or collection to stop the work so no hang up but I feared that I would never be able to use that collection. One day I just selected it and went to work or bed I forget which 😊. Once it had created all the previews or cached info about all my pictures the performance, while not great, was tollerable. I suspect that this might be worse for you and I wonder if after each of your imports it might be a good idea to let C1 do whatever it needs to for all images preferably while you are sleeping, shooting or watching TV 😉
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  • Permanently deleted user
    I too am a LIghtroom to Capture one mover. My LR cat is of 84,000 images and a catalog file of 2.5gig.

    Tried the import once with similar results to everyone else. Decideded to stick with LR 6.12 as my DAM
    and export to C1 as needed.

    I have lots of export presets and plugins on LR which I can continue to use and it is only a slight change to my workflow.
    (albeit with better RAW processing!! 😊

    Mike
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