Change parent folder structure that referenced Catalogs are stored in
Hello,
I want to change the folder structure and names on my archival external SSD where I store all my projects. I currently have it separated by project media > year > project name (ie Photography > 2022 > Men's Lifestyle Shoot). But with video becoming more and more part of my workflow I want to rename the parent folder "Photography" to something more meaningful such as "Projects" so it'll look like: Projects > 2022 > Mens Lifestyle Shoot. But I create catalogs for each of my projects and some are referenced catalogs while others are managed catalogs.
If I change the naming structure of the parent folders, I don't want to break any of the referenced links for the tons of catalogs that I've created. Is there a way to do this without breaking any links or accidentally messing up the catalogs? OR is there a just a better way to do store projects by year entirely that you can suggest?
I'm running C1 22 Pro, Build 15.4.1.7. Thanks for the help!
Cheers,
Landon
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If you have a catatog referencing (linking) the images then the problem with renaming or moving the folders or parent folders with the Finder or other C1-external tools is that the catalog links will point to the old folders.
Two approaches to cope with this:
Either you make the folder changes with the library tool in C1. This will change your actual folder names/hierarchy on the disk and update the links in the OPEN catalog at the same time. Problem might be if you have referenced the folders in more than one catalog, the links are only changed in the opened catalog.
Or, you do the changes outside C1 (with Finder) and use the locate folder function in every C1 catalog. Problem though might be that many users have reported issues with that in the past. You might possbly end up "locating" every offline image one by one, not even have a filter to find the offline files easily. I cannot encourage or discourage you as I almost never did this in the past (if ever).
As your folder restructuring seems to be only "cosmetic", think twice if you really want to do this. In the case you really do, take precautions (make backups, test it, note down every step you do, etc.)
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Thank you BeO for the response. It's made me rethink if I truly want to make these cosmetic changes that could potentially have a bad outcome.
May I ask what your setup is for catalogs (if you use them)? I want my data to be structured first by year, then by project. If this means creating one single catalog for the year (either managed or referenced) then what are the downsides (ie long load times, etc.)
I also have not explored C1 sessions in any regard. I'm just curious what your thoughts are and what your setup may be.
Thanks in advance!
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If you do one single catalog for each year, then you cannot search images across multiple years. (unless you create a big multiyear catalog in addition).
Here's my setup:
I also like to have my images structured in the file system. By year first, and beneath that I have permanent projects (recurring subjects where the date is not that important) or daily shoots or events, or short-period events like trips with the starting date of that period, e.g.
2021
2021 permanent project X
2021 permanent project Y
2021-01-15 event A
2021-02-01 trip B
...2022 Q1 (.... or one top folder for each quarter (or half-year) in case I have too many sub folders in that year)
...To tell the truth, I did not have this structure from the beginning, it is rather a result of a re-structuring after a couple of years messing around...
I used to have only one big "main" catalog, referencing my images in these folders. I have a couple more catalogs (or sessions) for less important things which are a little bit outside of my main stream, but not too many.
The performance seems to drop if a catalog has several 10k images, from what I read in the forum, but some users report they work with even 100k or so, there are probably a lot of factors to it.
Since two years I regularly use sessions first. When I'm in the field (on a trip) this is easy to use. In general I like sessions, they have the beauty to store all edits in files in a sidecar folder structure of your image location, not in a catalog, which seems to be more fail-safe (to me), and the edits and images are closer together and thus easier to manage, i.e. easy to move around as kind of a "package".
Sessions are however not meant for several ten thousand images (at least not on Windows), you cannot have many years in one session (unless you don't shoot a lot), that means you need (and will want) many sessions. But there is no easy way to search across all your images (i.e. across multiple sessions).
You can import several sessions into a big catalog (their images, respectively) including the edits and metadata you did in the sessions, so you can edit your images in the session first and once "finished" you can import them to a big catalog (keeping your folder structure, i.e. referenced). Then you need to make a choice (if you ever want to work with the images beyond what you did in the sessio) to either do all follow-up edits in the catalog (then the new edits will only live in the catalog) or to do follow-up edits in each session. Unfortunately there is no sync back from catalog edits to the session files.
I am just in a multi-day effort to export my images (as originals) from the old catalog(s) in order to let C1 create these sidecar folders and copy them into my image folder structure, so that I can edit them with a (dummy) session. I will do the edits using such a dummy session (or explicit sessions, that doesn't matter) and use the catalog to search my images I want to work with. You can actually search for images in the catalog which span over different folders and drag&drop them to a dummy session album (maybe first create also an album in the catalog for these images, so you can easily remove them from the catalog later and re-import them again after having your work finished in the dummy session via "Synchronize". Your session edits will be copied again to the catalog and thus you have them in the sidecar files as well as in your catalog.
Previews and adjustments/masks will exist twice though, but hey, nothing is perfect.
If that sounds complicated to you then it is due to (1) I am not very good to explain such things, (2) you are not familiar with how sessions work and lack experience, and (3) it actually is somehow complicated (but not overly, so).
My advice: Firstly, make a decent folder structure and be consistent, don't deviate.
You might want to change the structure later but that's ok. If you worked consistently with whatever structure until a certain point in time, it is easier and less risky to migrate to any new structure.Secondly, try sessions and learn the ins and outs. See if you like them. If you do, then..
Have a session for each photo shoot, and do as much metadata and editing in the session, only then import the images into a catalog, this can be a C1 catalog today but any other catalog or DAM in the future (though a third party tool might add to complexity). From this point on (images in the C1 catalog), do your further edits consistently in the catalog or consistently in a session, either or.
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Another preference of mine is to use keywords (and smart albums) where otherwise other users would do a static assignment to an album, e.g. if I printed some images for a certain purpose I want to remember that, and a keyword "printedForX" will easier travel with your image regardless which tool you will use in the future (in case you replace C1 in the future with something else, or you switch from C1 catalogs to sessions, or from a big catalog to many smaller ones, etc.
(on the other hand you can always assign a keyword to all your images in a static album in the future, but I prefer bot to bother with static albums in the first place, unless for very specific and rare cases).
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