Moving my Catalog and photos to an external hard drive
Hello,
I've been using capture one for a couple of years now. In the file explorer all of my photos are organized in folders of years folder > months folder > raw photos + edited exported photos from c1 folder. Each year is a new catalog. I have 6 catalogs and around 66,000 files in them. I'm not sure but I think that in some of my imports I added the photos to the catalog and in other imports I copied the photos into the catalog(I'm not sure if it matter regarding my question here). The storage on my computer is completely full, so I bought 2 hard drives. Into the 2 hard drives I just copied the big folders of all of my photos which is separated into years folders + catalog > months folders > raw photos + edited exported photos from c1 folder (so just all of my photos as they are organized on my pc storage + all the catalogs.
My question is, what do I need to do now to make capture one know that he needs to know that the original raw photos are now in the external hard drive, or in other words how do I make capture one forget the pc storage location and make him locate that the originals are now on the hard drive. My goal is to delete all of the photos and the catalogs from the pc storage to free space, and only use capture one with my external drive connected to the pc.
I searched for online articles and questions that others asked but I don't see my exact situation in those examples, I also watched some of David's tutorials on catalogs and folder management but I'm not sure I fully understand the way it works and where do I need to see the photos inside capture one after I do the relocate. I'm quite terrified to delete the photos and the catalogs from the pc storage before I'm sure capture one will work only work only with the external hard drive and it will know to locate the original photos from it.
* except the organized file explorer folders for all of my photos and catalogs, inside capture one I mostly use the 'user collection' area. Will that be the area i will still use when I will work through the external hard drive? or I need to move to the 'folders' area > In catalog > C: / E:? In this matter I'm quite lost..
thank you very much in advanced! , I know this is really long I just wanted to add all the details as I'm not sure what's important to the situation and what's not.
I'm using windows, Capture one 22.
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Sounds pretty easy in theory, :) .
https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002516757-Moving-folders-of-referenced-images
https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003138037-How-do-I-move-a-Catalog-I just tried it with a test catalog of just 30 referenced images (ie not in the Catalog folder).
Within the C1 Library tool I clicked the "+" folder button to add a USB drive to the C1 folders list.
I then dragged dragged the folder containing the 30 images to the USB drive and all was good.
I closed C1 and copied the catalog folder (containing the catalog file, plus the Originals, Cache and Adjustments folders) also to the USB drive and opened the catalog from there and again all was good.So that simple test worked but I would be pretty nervous in your shoes.
Do you have a second computer to work with?
I'd be installing C1 on it, copying the catalogs and images over with Windows Explorer and trying to get everything onto the external drive and tested from there.0 -
Did you ever find an answer to this? I'm finding myself in the same boat.
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I made a video some time ago about traveling with Capture One. It discusses moving catalogs between systems. Perhaps it will have some helpful info.
Traveling and Returning Home with Capture One
https://youtu.be/9UvCxwHHY0w0 -
Migration from old to a new SSD (or HDD) disk drive not an easy process if you have 40K+ images in your catalogue. All recommendations which I have red here before (just drug and drop folder to a new location) are not working because of following
1) moving files taks very, very long time and any external SSD or HDD will overheat during this process. I had this problem in the past, after long copy process I have to throw away absolutely new Seagate HDD.
2) Frequently C1 returns number of errors during the file moving process and I wasn't sure if all files were moved correctly.
How I did my migration from one external HDD to another. 1) I have connected both HDD to my MacBook Pro and then start copying folder by folder from old HDD to a new HDD keeping the same folder structure on a new HDD. For my set of files (5TB) it takes three days because I have to make a break for some time to let HDD cool down after coping one or two folders at once. Each my folder contains about 10...15K images. 2) when all files were copied to a new HDD, an old HDD was turned off and I was stared C1. In a C1 orders section, all image folders were marked as missing with triangle sign. I have select the top most parent folder and click the right button on my mouse and then selects Locate menu item. In a file browsing window I have selected a the same top most pictures folder on a new HDD. 3) C1 starts rebuilding new links and Meta data from selected folder on my new HDD. Everything was fine except one moment - C1 starts rebuilding images preview and progress bar shows that this process could take about 15 hours. I was canceled this process and exit rom C1. During the next C1 start I made folder sync up and creates preview only for images imported during last year (also recommending to sync up by smaller set of folders otherwise process takes a while).
The similar migration process in Lightroom is much easier and happens almost instantly. You would need only to copy all images to a new HDD.
Do not forget to mage the catalogue backup before and after this process.
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