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C1 v7 Catalogs

John Black

Active member
I've been using Capture One for nearly 10 years and I'm very used to its work flow, etc., etc., etc... except for sessions and catalogs. For years I've been creating directories on the HD, named by trip or whatever, had raws in one sub-folder, processed in another. In C1, navigated to the folder (folder tree visible at the left) and all worked fine. Never bothered (knowingly) with sessions.

Over the past year C1 has become really slow when first open - HD whizzing away as its reads something... While I didn't use Sessions, C1 did, so all these pictures from C1's perspective where within 1 session. That's not how sessions are intended to be used, so I bit the bullet and created a catalog.

Started importing the "raw" subfolders into the catalog. 100, 200, 500 images - no problem. Now the catalog is up to around 3000 images and C1 is getting unstable again. There have been alot of crashes with folder management - like deleting a folder or expanding the tree to show the hierarchy. I've lost count of how many crash reports I've sent to Capture One. And the slow start-ups are back. It's taking 15-30 seconds when the app is first opened to do whatever it does when first reading the library. At this point, there has been no upside (from end user standpoint) to using the catalog approach.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if I'm going about catalogs all wrong. I came into this thinking "Lightroom" with one big catalog for everything. Should I be creating a catalog for each trip or sub-group of pictures? That seems to miss the point if that's how things are supposed to be done. Is there some unwritten rule that no more than X files should be in a session or library? So, just looking for some best practices here from other people who manage large libraries in C1. If I'm approaching this "catalog" thing all wrong, now is the time for me to shift directions.
 

gazwas

Active member
John, I feel your pain.

C1 is a wonderful RAW converter but a terrible piece of catalogue software and have no idea why it is bring sold in its current unstable state. I hear comments from dealers and users saying to give it some slack as it's still in its first generation release but that is little help when you start having the problems you're experiencing.

C1 was originally designed to be used with sessions and thus is still the best way to use it IMO. Saying this, C1 is still not the most stable piece if software and I regularly experience slow downs with the need to re-start the software often. The total crashes are few and far between now but still do happen.

Sessions work for me as every new job for a client is a new session and I keep all my clients work in their own folders by year on my HD so easy to find. Something similar could work for you if you break up your shoots by location/subject or similar. Key wording in Spotlight is very powerful now so might be all you need. If you need more integration then Lightroom is the better all in one software.

The only downside to sessions is with every full point update (eg 7.1 to 7.2) all the previous session previews need regenerating which is very annoying as it slows your machine down until it finishes. Making adjustments to images during the build is almost impossible and a pain if you you only want to adjust a single image but have to wait for 600 previews to build.
 

John Black

Active member
I'm VERY folder centric and sessions have worked okay, but I think I let the sessions get way too big and that introduced instability. Moving to a library is a nightmare with C1 crashing 50% of the time if I add a new folder, do a new import to an existing folder, and deleting a folder can have 2-3 successive crashes... At this point I'm ~33% into regrouping files, so going back isn't easy and going forward is painful. I'm a C1 beta tester (for v8) and they are probably regretting that decision, and I'm tired of sending in crash reports.

Organizationally, things are messy because I process the Leica M-240 files in C1 and the Leica S files in LR. C1 tolerates the Leica S at best, it's not a supported camera and some C1 functionality is not available. Thus, the S pretty much has to be processed in LR. Thus, now I have two libraries, keywords are stored in the apps, not in the individual files... Sigh... Messy... And this is before dealing with multiple computers and some files on this computer, some files on that computer.

I decided to take a break and re-evaluate. No great ah-ha's yet.
 

mesposito

Member
I'm VERY folder centric and sessions have worked okay, but I think I let the sessions get way too big and that introduced instability. Moving to a library is a nightmare with C1 crashing 50% of the time if I add a new folder, do a new import to an existing folder, and deleting a folder can have 2-3 successive crashes... At this point I'm ~33% into regrouping files, so going back isn't easy and going forward is painful.
One possibility would be to begin to split up your giant session into smaller sessions - organized by year, client or some such criteria. I assume you have your images broken down in some logical folder hierarchy.

In the Import dialog, click on "Include Subfolders" and "Include existing adjustments". The alternative is to do the same with catalogs. If the indexing isn't performing well, or making the app unstable, smaller databases may solve the problem. I'm talking generally here as I use sessions. I'm experimenting with catalogs but building the previews is taking a long time and I'm not in a hurry.

Of course make a clone backup before doing anything like this. Protect your images at all costs.
 

gazwas

Active member
I'm VERY folder centric and sessions have worked okay, but I think I let the sessions get way too big and that introduced instability. Moving to a library is a nightmare with C1 crashing 50% of the time if I add a new folder, do a new import to an existing folder, and deleting a folder can have 2-3 successive crashes...
Being obsessed by folders is ok with C1 and this is how I work using lots of folders. However, a few things I've learnt over the years with C1 are as follows.

1. Always work with sessions.
2. Keep session size down - less than 1000 images per session
3. Never use C1's import function.
4. Create a session on your HD, quit C1 then import images manually from CF card into the new session capture folder.
5. Only open C1 when all images are imported and select capture folder.
6. Allow C1 to build all preview before trying to adjust images - 'window > activities'

I get less hiccups this way.
 
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