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How to make Capture One generate missing previews?

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13 comments

  • Ian Wilson
    Moderator
    Top Commenter

    If you are in a a particular folder, you don't have to have Capture One regenerate tens of thousands of previews. Just open the folder, with its 150 (or whatever) images, Select All (Cmd-A), then choose regenerate previews and it will regenerate previews for those 150 only.

    Ian

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    You're right. Regenerating previews for the entire catalogue only needs to be done one time.

    Do you have any idea why previews are generated automatically for some folders but not for others?

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    SFA

    They're photos that are already in the catalogue, imported into the catalogue a long time ago. For some reason they don't all have previews; I assume because Capture One didn't finish generating previews before it was shut down after the photos in question were imported. My impression is that in most cases Capture One starts generating previews automatically, if any are missing, when a folder with is selected, but with some folders it doesn't.

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    It may very well be an issue of preview files appearing to Capture One to exist but not actually existing.

    I just noticed that there's also an issue of thumbnails not being generated. Inside my current catalogue, in the Previews folder, there are 55,296 sets of .cof and .cop files, but in the Thumbnails folder there are only 16,985 .cot files. So it seems that currently 38,311 thumbnails are missing. I wonder if thumbnails are only generated when files are viewed in Capture One.

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  • Ian Wilson
    Moderator
    Top Commenter

    Do you have any idea why previews are generated automatically for some folders but not for others?

    In my experience, the generating of previews has often been a bit erratic, from time to time. For instance, mostly as you import images it starts generating previews while the import is going on. But very occasionally it just won't, and waits until they have all been imported. It's been like that for years (though I don't think I've seen it yet with 23.)

    Perhaps "quirky" is the appropriate word!

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    @Ian
    Yes, definitely quirky.

    @SFA
    In order to check thumbnail generation I did some scrolling through the catalogue in grid view,  and the number of .cot files in the Thumbnails folder has now increased by thousands. So it seems that rather than being generated along with preview files, thumbnails are generated when images are actually displayed in the browser in Capture One. In a session with a smaller number of images I assume you're more likely to having viewed all these images, and consequently they should all have thumbnails.

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    @SFA

    In my case, most of the images in my current catalogue were imported into the catalogue when importing a previous Capture One catalogue, so all previews and thumbnails would have had to be generated from scratch. It would be useful if there was a way to complete this process if it hadn't finished.

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    @SFA

    I've verified the catalogue, and there are no issues with it. Also, it's a relatively new catalogue (in connection with the issues I have with Capture One becoming unresponsive constantly, I've created new catalogues a number of times to make sure that these issues weren't caused by undetected problems with the catalogue).

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    @SFA

    When I've created a new catalogue, I've created an empty catalogue and imported the old catalogue into the new one. This does indeed take quite a long time. And it hasn't solved any of the issues with unresponsiveness.

    Regarding unresponsiveness (here's a description), I doubt it has anything to do with thumbnails and previews. If it had, I assume Capture One support known about it – and since I first contacted them about the issue five months go, they haven't as much as offered a suggestion as to what could be causing it. Also, you shouldn't think that unresponsiveness when switching between tooltabs would relate to thumbnails and previews, but of course you never know.

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    @SFA

    I've looked practically everywhere on the hard drive but couldn't find anything related to DxO. Capture One preference files didn't contain anything either. And according to support, it's unrelated. So I assume it's a false lead. Also, I've sent off everything I could think of to support, and they haven't come up with anything yet, not as much as a suggestion what try in order to solve the issue. I assume if one of the files I've sent them was corrupted, they would have known.

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    I finally heard from support.

    There is no way of making Capture One generate missing previews other than regenerating previews for the entire catalogue.

    As for thumbnails, there's no other way of making Capture One generate thumbnail than to scroll slowly through the catalogue, which of course isn't a useful solution if you have a large catalogue.

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  • Thomas Kyhn
    Top Commenter

    I made a quick test just to make sure that the same would happen with a new catalogue:
    * created a new catalogue
    * imported a folder containing 365 image files
    * let Capture One finish generating previews

    Status:
    15 thumbnails (.cot files)
    365 previews (.cop files)

    After slowly scrolling through the catalogue, the number of thumbnails had increased to 365.

    . . .

    I've made a request for an option to generate missing previews and thumbnails – here.

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  • Reto Tuchschmid

    You can Regenerate the Previews (and thumbnails) by selecting the files and system folders.

    What I noticed though is that when the computer is locked, it stops generating them.  Therefore if you have a large batch e.g. when importing a large number of photos or if you move them around, then it might well be that the generation of the previews is not finished and you end up with the missing thumbnails and previews.  C1 picks up the generation when you unlock/login again.  But if you by then have taken your catalog offline (when referenced), then the previews/thumbnails are missing in the overview.  This is what I observed.

    I opened a feature request that thumbnail/preview generation continues to run in the background also in Windows locked mode.  https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/11044778601629-Generate-previews-thumbnails-in-background-while-OS-user-is-locked

     

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