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Maximum recommended catalog size

Chris Sargent
I realise that this topic has been discussed often over the years but I figure that I’d spend some time ‘tidying’ up my library in 2022 I currently have a catalog for each year.. but wanted the convenience of a single ‘master’ catalog. I have apps 100,000 images mixture of RAW, TIFF and JPGS Anyone got experience of combining 100k images into single catalog (plan to reference images on external drive) I have a MacBook Pro M1X so performance of hardware should be OK?
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8 comments

Date Votes
  • Permanently deleted user

    I’ve been using C1P since version 8 and now at version 22. I had to split up my Lightroom image catalog of 150k+ images into separate catalogs to keep the number of image <30k images as C1P chokes on large catalogs. I’m using a referenced folder structure to store my 220k+ images. 

    A big advantage of C1P is the ability to have several catalogs open at a time. Unfortunately, you can only search within a single catalog. I started using Photo Mechanic 6 Plus to create a searchable catalog containing all of my images. This allows me to search to locate which folder in my library the search target resides. Then I can open the appropriate C1P catalog containing this image. It’s kind of a kluge, but it works.

    Since I’m using a OWC ThunderBlade 8TB external SSD with read/write speeds of 2,300+ mb/s connected to an iMac Pro, the drives speeds and CPU are not the issue. LR definitely does better with larger catalogs, but the image quality and feature set in C1P is superior. 

    Each version of C1P seems to speed up the catalogs. I just upgraded my aging iMac Pro with the 14” MacBook Pro M1Max with 64GB RAM and 2TB internal SSD with 5,000+ read/write speeds. It smokes the iMac Pro.

    My current, most used catalog contains images from 2019 to the present. There is currently about 27k images in this catalog. I going to keep adding to this catalog until I start noticing a slow down before starting a new catalog.

    I hope this helps.

    Regards,
    Bud James

    Please check out my fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/budjamesphoto.

     

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  • Chris Sargent

    That is incredibly helpful.. I think that I came to a similar decision.. I’ve found a way to split my photos across two or three catalogs so will keep an eye on performance.. I had a demo of photomechanic once.. perhaps I’ll re-visit it to see how it might support my workflow.. or use LRC as the ‘super set’
    catalog for searching.

    I did some research this holiday into auto tagging my images.. I’ve processed 27k so far and the results are a good start for improving searches

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  • Permanently deleted user
    • Edited

    Using Photo Mechanic 6 Plus, you can add GPS data, ratings and key words to the DNG files. When I import these files into C1P, all of this date comes with the file without the use of separate sidecar files. 

    A new program that I’m checking out now is Excire. I ingested my entire referenced folder library and it uses AI to add keywords, face recognition and other metadata. This allows me to search across my entire image collection. It’s also a very fast browser for all kinds of files. It looks very promising and it’s less expesive the Photo Mechanic 6 Pro. They offer a few 30 day trial if you want to check it out.

    Regards,
    Bud James

    Please check out my fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/budjamesphoto.

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Hi Chris,

    I don't remember well but I am quite sure there were some examples, in this forum, given by people using C1 catalogues as large as 100k images without any issue. Actually, your configuration and the way in which you manage and take care of your softwares and hardware play a great role in the capacity of Capture One to deal with large catalogues.

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  • Quentin Stafford-Fraser
    • Edited

    Revisiting this thread rather late, but I'm looking at the same issue.  I have about 70k images on a (fast but not SSD) USB3 drive. Sessions have always worked fine for me but catalogues of any size are just painful in C1.  

    I'm just creating a new catalogue of those images, leaving them in place but storing the catalog on my internal SSD.  It's been going about 48 hours and is a little over half-way through - at this stage it's adding one new image every two or three seconds.

    So I too have come to depend on Photo Mechanic as the way of managing my images, which works beautifully.  I just wish there was an easy way to round-trip from there into C1 for editing an individual image (without it needing to be in a catalog or session). I haven't found one yet.

    Admittedly, I am using C1 v20 at present, and I expect it would be faster if I paid 200 quid to upgrade to v22.  But I'm hesitant; would there be significant speed improvements, I wonder...?

    Since this has always been a C1 weakness, I think the PhotoMechanic-plus-C1 combination could be a really nice alternative to Lightroom-plus-Photoshop if there was better interaction between the two.

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  • Chris Sargent

    I have the latest version and performance does not seem significantly improved

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  • Permanently deleted user
    • Edited

    I am on the subscription license so I just upgrade when new versions become available. I am currently running C1P 23 and it adds some very nice features. I think that the browsing speed has been improved too, but that's hard to quantify.

    Regards,
    Bud James

    Please check out my fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography.

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  • Ryan Johnson

    I've created a thread on Twitter to get an answer from them. Come support: https://twitter.com/amdphreak/status/1628183182783782913?s=20

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