Follow-up on sessions vs catalogs!
Hello, Over the past few weeks, I've asked a few questions about catalogs vs sessions. In addition to the answers I got, I've been doing a bunch of research (mostly watching some of the excellent C1 training videos on YouTube) and experimentation. I figured it would be good to report back on what I've learned.
First, some background. I've got about 60 GB of photos spanning 2011-2016 in Aperture (which I can no longer run, but still have the library). Plus another 50 GB in C1 in a random assortment of catalogs and sessions. Plus some other stuff that's even more poorly organized on various hard drives and SSDs. My goal is to get this all in one coherent place.
I think I've settled on one large catalog, using referenced images. I was previously unaware that this option even existed; I was thinking catalog meant "images in the C1 database" and session meant "images outside the C1 database". That led to me thinking that a catalog forced me into having everything in one monolithic blob which had to live on a single drive, get moved around as a unit, get backed up as a unit, etc. Now that I understand what referened catalogs are, this makes the most sense for me. I can keep a single catalog that covers everything while being able to store images on various media.
I was also struggling with how I could recover all my old images from Aperture, since I no longer had any hardware I could run it on. The answer to that turned out to be that Aperture (like C1), only makes the database look like a single file in the finder because it's a package. You can still get to the individual images (neatly organized by date) in the finder with "Show Package Contents". C1 can't (won't?) import them directly from the package, but you can use the finder to copy Aperture's entire "Masters" folder tree to someplace else, and then have C1 import that. MyKFCExperience
Here, I'm going to throw some shade on the C1 UX. In some places, they talk about a "referenced" catalog. But in the import dialog, they have Import To / Add to Catalog, with a help message of "Your files will stay where they are", which leaves you scratching your head trying to find what you need to do to get "referenced" mode. Pick one name for it and use that name consistently. Using different names in different places just confuses people.
Anyway, hope that helps people who may be struggling with the same questions.
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I agree on the "referenced" terminology inconsistency. That isn't helping matters. It is confusing in the UI.
One last thing I'd suggest you make sure before you commit to putting everything into a single catalog is to make sure the C1 catalog performs well with the number of images you want to put in it. You don't say how many images you're talking about. The total size of the image data is irrelevant as that's just stored on disk and referenced by the catalog database. What matters is the number of images in the catalog because that determines how many items are in the catalog (and thus how much data) the catalog database has to manage to do its job.
I myself don't have a large catalog since I only started using C1 a few years ago and I'm not shooting tons of images now and I kept my previous images in the LR6 catalog where I can still access them. But, there is lots of discussion out there on where the tipping point of frustration and slow performance is for a large number of images in the catalog. It would be worth reviewing what others have said about that and making sure your plan is well within the catalog size capabilities.
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Can't you just import the Aperture Library into Capture One?
Ian
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@Original Poster
Bear in mind that C1 did not originally have Catalogs, only sessions.
So the availability of referenced files permitted the creation of catalog functionality that could directly reference existing sessions without creating copies of original files or breaking the session folder structure.
That also meant that other popular catalogs, LightRoom and Aperture for example, could be left as they were and still have a C1 catalog associated with them.
Hence the message "Your files will stay where they are".
Personally I don't use catalogues much and much prefer sessions. They better suit most of my needs.
But, that said, I probaby struck lucky and found a section of the user guide or release notes that outlines the difference between Internal and External images files in a catalog quite early in my voyage of new functionality discovery so never had a problem with the concepts.
Contrary to that was my experience with Catalog only LightRoom V1 with which I never gelled at all in terms of the catalog. In that case I think I got too deeply into wrong think by skipping some of the "Read this first" type of documentation and ended up repeatedly confusing myself.
So I do understand the potential for confusion.
Luckily I could abandon LR because at the time I was using a more "session " like application that had more functionality and produced better results. When I followed that up with C1 I could share the same image folders for both applications and so the concept of a "referenced" data source was already very familiar by functionality of not naming convention, when catalogs were introduced to C1.
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