What can a catalog do a session can't? And the other way round.
Hi,
I just had some problems with my main catalog and I was wondering, if there is anything that is only possible in a catalog but not in a session.
Some thought experiment: When you read about using a catalog vs sessions it is always about workflows. E.g. use one session per event or use a catalog to collect all images over time. But actually you could have the idea to do the same thing the other way round: Use one catalog per event and have a huge session where you collect all favourite images across multiple projects. Or use only sessions or only catalogs for both.
Is there a reason that one is more suitable for the task than the other? Sessions also allow you to create albums, smartalbums, sort and filter,...
The only true difference I can find is where images are stored and if adjustments are in a single or many files. But I could easily be wrong with that and would be interested to know.
Any ideas?
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In Catalogs you have a greater range of possibilities for image organisation. So as well as albums and smart albums you can have projects and folders. For large catalogs, that is really helpful. (And these are all virtual collections, so it is possible for an image to be in more than one collection - to take a trivial example, an image of your pet dog could be in an album called Animals and also in an Album called Family, and also in a project for a photobook.) Also you can have albums and smart albums within categories. So I could have a global smart album of all my 5 star images, but I could also have a smart album within my India project and that would show me only the 5 start images from India.
There are good explanations in a video here. https://youtu.be/YbkBx8djtSw
I use a catalog as the final destination of my images because I want to be able to find images taken on different occasions using keywords. So for example, I can find all images I have taken of kingfishers, whether taken in Delhi several years ago or in Bristol yesterday.
Sessions are a good self-contained way of working. They have fewer organisational options, but they have other advantages - such as the edit information being stored with the image files (in subfolders). That means they are easy to copy and carry around. So in this session...
... I can copy the whole 2021M October folder and all its contents from my MacBook to my iMac and carry on working. I will in fact do that at the end of the month, and I will import the images I want to keep permanently (the Selects) into my master catalog.
You could use a catalog per project and a huge session for all of the images, but...
- you would be faced with how to get the images out of the catalogs and into the session - a lot of exporting to do as the edit information has to go too, from inside the catalog to the subfolders (specifically in the Settings141 subfolder in my screen shot). Capture One would do it for you but still, a lot to do.
- you would be using the solution with fewer organisational features (a session) for the larger collection of images. But with larger numbers of images, ways of keeping them properly organised would become more important.
Others may have further comments to make, but I hope those are helpful as a start.
Ian
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PS - I realise that you are on Windows, and my screen shot is from a Mac, but the principle is the same.
Ian
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I would not disagree with Ian's observations in any way.
However, I would add that if portability during the early choosing and editing stages is an important factor to you the session approach for that stage can be useful and backup can be well self-contained for all aspects of the images.
Once you have your output files things depend on numbers.
A catalogue of completed images might be worth having for re-discovery of images at a later point should that be necessary. A catalogue that is not regularly used for editing is likely to be quite quick to use.
On the other hand, one could do much the same thing by making a session that collects all of the final "outputs" from other sessions. and would become the completed images collection.
Much depends on what you are used to, what you are comfortable with and what you think you may want to do at some point in the future.
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Thank you both for the input and especially for the elaborate answer by Ian. I didn't realize that sessions only have albums and smart albums. I'm actually using groups and projects and like them a lot, so i will stay with the catalog. At least albums and smart albums should work the same in sessions, so an image can be contained in multiple albums, don't they?
Just to give some background: Up to now, I had a setup to sync my catalog and the original raws between my main PC and my notebook. So I am free to import and edit images on both. But for some time now my catalog behaved a bit weired and of lately it seems completely broken. Automatically syncing a catalog probably isn't a good idea. I could imagine, that once I started CO1 on the notebook while CO1 on the main PC was still running with the catalog open in the middle of a sync. That is asking for trouble of course, but I'm a bit puzzled about how the catalog seems broken now, and "check catalog" reported no errors.
As support hasn't answered for almost 3 weeks, I decided to move everything to a new catalog. So I encoded my album structure in tags and exported all originals. Now I can create the same folder structure in a fresh catalog, import all images and assign all images to the right albums by filtering for the tags. And there the idea came up, why use a catalog again and not a session instead?
As you might guess, I use CO only for hobby and have just a few 1000 images as of now. I will stay away from automatic syncing now. Anyway, I didn't use the notebook very much when at home. And when I'm out of house and want my catalog at hand, I still can copy everything to the notebook and back manually. That should be by far safer.
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At least albums and smart albums should work the same in sessions, so an image can be contained in multiple albums, don't they?
Yes, in a session too.
Ian
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Interesting approach. I suppose you don't use the organization features in C1 like albums, smart albums etc.? In my understanding, you would loose them each time you restore your old session.
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