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Move images from one catalog to another along with the edits

Permanently deleted user

Is it possible in Capture One 20 to move images from one catalog to another along with the edits?

The reason is: so far I have all my images in one catalog and now I want to organize the catalogs differently.
There should be a catalog with the images and edits of the current year and an archive catalog where I archive all images and edits of the previous years.
There are about 3700 images in total as I have only been taking pictures for about 3 years and am very rigorous with deleting images that I don't like 100%.
Then at the beginning of each new year, I like to move the previous year's images into the archive folder along with their processing.

I have two thoughts on how to proceed:
1. create a new empty catalog (name: "Archive").
To import into the catalog "Archive" my current catalog.
Then from the catalog "Archive" delete all images folders of the current year (2021).
Then in the current folder I delete all images from the previous 2 years (2020 and 2019).

2. create a catalog backup of the current catalog.
Rename the backup in finder to "Archive".
Open the backup catalog "Archive" and delete the image folders of the current year (2021).
In the current catalog, delete the images folders of the previous 2 years (2019 and 2020).

So with either method, the current catalog would only contain the images from 2021. In January 2022, I import the current catalog into the archive catalog, which puts all the images from 2021 into the archive.
In the current catalog, I remove the 2021 images folders and start over with 2022. By doing this, I hope to continue to use the keywords and other catalog-specific settings.

Is one of the two considerations a reasonable approach or is there a better one? My desire is to be able to search in all my previous images in the archive catalog, because I have assigned keywords and created collections. Therefore, using Sessions does not seem to me to be the appropriate approach in this case.

I hope I was able to explain my request in an understandable way. Of course I did a search in the forum, but only find answers that are 4 years and older for older CO versions and do not help me. I would appreciate any hints and tips.

My system:
MacMini 2020 | 3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 | 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 | Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB | 1 TB Internal SSD, 912 GB free
Current catalog and pictures stored on a fast external SanDisk Extreme SSD, 1 TB, connected via USB 3.1
Archive folder on a Western Digital Elements 4 TB hard drive, connected via USB 3.0
Monitor: EIZO CS2740

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • Ian Wilson
    Moderator
    Top Commenter

    You can export images as a catalog. Instructions for that are here

    https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002517297-Exporting-a-Catalog 

    Note that the images have to be in a Collection (an album, smart album, group or project). You could create a smart album, for instance of all images taken in the year 2017.

    In a new catalog, you can import a Capture One catalog. Instructions for that are here.

    https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002518258-Importing-a-Capture-One-Catalog 

    So you could export images from your existing catalog, into one or more new catalogs, which you could then import into your new catalog.

    Or to do what you want, you could more simply

    • export all the images for the current year into a new catalog - using a smart album for the date range you want.
    • rename the existing catalog to Archive.
    • When you are happy that the current year catalog is OK, delete the current year images from the Archive catalog. Make sure you don't select the option to delete them from disc, if they are referenced images.

    But one more thought is that 3700 images is not a lot. (My catalog has over 40,000.) You could just keep the catalog you have, and do a bit of organisation, like collections by year, subject etc. 

    Ian

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  • Permanently deleted user

    I use Ian's last suggestion and it works very well. My catalog has ~50k images and it's worked well since C1 8 (I'm now on 21). At one point  had 70k images, but I regularly revisit my images and cull duplicated ones. For example, I photograph a lot of birds and last year's golden eagle shots may well be better than similar shots taken several years ago.

    I'm not a fan of separate catalogs for years, subjects, etc., because I often want to search through all of my images (I'm very deliberate and complete about adding keywords, descriptions and other metadata so searching the entire catalog or a folder or other entity is pretty easy).

    When I import new images, I store the original Raw files in a "_New Images" folder (the underscore ensures that this folder is at the top of both Finder and C1 lists). After culling and editing, I move the images (using C1 of course) into imwhatever other folder I want, so "_New Images" only contains images I haven't yet finished with, and C1's Recent Imports sets have the recent imports, which is useful if I haven't finished emptying _New Images.

    If you go with a single catalog, just create collections for each year or whatever other organization you want. Or (again in C1) create new folders and label them by year or whatever, and then move the appropriate images into them.

    It's really convenient to have a single "archive" catalog, and until your collection gets much much larger than it now is, I suspect you'll be much happier with one catalog that's thoughtfully organized.

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Ian and Abbott,

    Thank you very much for your kind and helpful responses to my question.
    First, however, please accept my apologies for taking so long to respond. Unfortunately, I had a lot of deadlines and tasks in my work at short notice and therefore did not have the time or mood to deal with Capture One.

    Ian, thanks for the links to the tutorials and your advices. Soon I expect my work will be quieter again and I will look at the tutorials in detail.

    Abbott, I note that we have a very similar approach. I also copy the newly captured images first into a selection folder where I sort out many images, because I want to keep only the best ones. I then move the remaining images inside Capture One to a folder with the date they were taken. Then I assign the keywords for these images.

    Just like you, I want to have all the images in one catalog so I can search the entirety. I also look through all the images several times a year and delete those that are no longer relevant or I have made better images of the same motives in the meantime with increasing experience.

    Backup is very important to me. So I'm still looking for a catalog strategy where I have a "working catalog" with all the images locally on the Mac and at least two backups of the images with the edits and with the catalog (because of keywords and my collections) on my backup medias.

    Thanks to both of your answers, I can now better address the backup strategy and find a way of working that makes sense for me.

    The second reason is Capture One 21, which I had installed when it was released. But there were such significant delays when editing images, and especially when drawing masks, that it was a pain for me to use Capture One 21. Here in the forum there are solutions for poor program performance, but none of them brought a satisfactory improvement for me. So in January I completely uninstalled Capture One 21 and reinstalled Capture One 20, which works at the speed I'm used to.

    Since Capture One 20 cannot open a Capture One 21 catalog, I had to revert to the last backup I made in Capture One 20 before installing Capture One 21. However, since I had done very few edits in Capture One 21 due to very poor program performance, this was not so problematic. I may give Capture One 21 another chance later this year if it appears from the reactions here on the forum that Capture One 21 has also improved in terms of performance. Until then, I want to have a backup strategy that I can use to avoid losing a lot of edits in case I then have to go back to Capture One 20.
    This makes me think: do you happen to know if it's possible to import a Capture One 21 catalog into Capture One 20? In any case, I will give this a try.

    Thanks again for your kind help.
    Best regards

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