Capture One Pro 7 - The Catalog is garbage software!

[Jim MSP]

The OP of the thread "How do you catalog your images" says Media One is very slow and unintuitive to find images.

What do you think about this?

Also: does keywording work - or is it as painfully bad as in the CO catalog? (where it needs so many step it's basically unusable).

Two questions.
I don't find MP slow and unintuitive. It works reasonably well on my fast Windows machine. But all I do are rather basic searches.
Second, the keywording works quite well. I really like the interface for adding keywords.

I have switched to LR most of the time because Phase One never integrated MP very well with Capture One. I think they tried early on, but gave it fewer resources than required. Besides, the code was old and probably hard to modify.

[The View]

I have switched to LR most of the time because Phase One never integrated MP very well with Capture One. I think they tried early on, but gave it fewer resources than required. Besides, the code was old and probably hard to modify.

That's what I was fearing. I heard it was based on the old Microsoft Expressions, which was based on iView Media Pro.

Looks like this software is a layer cake of code.


But: if you had the choice between the Capture One Pro 7 catalog and Media One - which would you pick?

Or is it generally a bad idea to create a database on top of  old software with a freshened user interface skin on top?

I sometimes feel Phase One, with their stubborn NO to get their cataloging up to speed, is trying to discourage me from using Capture One Pro 7 and go for Lightroom.

[Jim MSP]

...


But: if you had the choice between the Capture One Pro 7 catalog and Media One - which would you pick?

....

I have made the choice. I use Media Pro and CO in a Sessions mode. They work well together, just not as well as I would like or expected when MP first came out.

[Gandalf]

I sometimes feel Phase One, with their stubborn NO to get their cataloging up to speed, is trying to discourage me from using Capture One Pro 7 and go for Lightroom.

I think you need to decide how important image quality is to you. Like everything Phase One, Capture One offers slightly higher image quality but at a cost. Lightroom gives you basic image review, metadata, key wording, raw processing with a plugin infrastructure, and a pretty decent printing setup, and then a full image catalog when you are done. Capture One gives you the sessions workflow (that really only makes sense shooting tethered or with a multi-part project), better color, better tethered workflow, and the ability to output multiple file types to multiple places simultaneously. Working your images in C1 and cataloging to Lightroom is willfully giving yourself an endless headache (I know, I've been doing it for years). Choosing Lightroom over C1 is admitting 'good enough' image quality is good enough and deciding to make your life simple. There is no shame in going with the smart, obvious choice.

C1 makes sense for photographers (fashion, architecture) where an image will get worked heavily in post and only the final image is kept. Sure, the raws may get archived somewhere, but they are probably never revisited. There was a long period of time that professional images went through C1, but personal images just lived in Lightroom. Another major advantage to lightroom is the ability to organize in stacks. If you shoot any kind of composite images, stacks allow you to keep the raw files that form the image organized together. In C1 you have to use session albums to achieve the same thing. As I said, with all things Phase One, the incremental image quality comes at a cost. Only you can decide whether it is worth it to you.

[Another Paul]

I try to stay optimistic about the state of the C1 catalog. Hopefully the relative lack of activity, visibility, and marketing for Media Pro indicates that the robust cataloging functionality many of us need will arrive in C1 v8.

I only need all my large files to actually show up in the catalog. How hard can that be?...

[The View]

Yes, Gandalf, this is why I'm still using Capture One Pro. I like it.

Only for higher iso shots I use Camera RAW.

Another Paul, I think you're right about Media One Pro having no future. It's very old software with a fresh interface.

We just need two things from the catalog to become better:

1. Stop those cases where the catalog just becomes corrupted for the most ridiculous reasons, e.g. deleting a folder that still has images in it (you need to first delete all the images, then the empty folder) and many more instances. Recently I had a catalog going bad for no reason at all. Closed it one day, never could open it up again.

2. We need workable keywording. C1P7 - no way to keyword with this. Way too many steps. What we need is a simple process:

a. highlight the images you want to keyword
b. write the keyword into its field
c. deselect the images

I mean this is standard procedure in Lightroom since version 1, in Bridge e.g. for adding metadata, etc. So it can't be so difficult to do. Or is the C1 catalog based on equally old and redundant software like Media One Pro?

Then it's time to hire good coders and write modern software that is a match Capture One, and not a club foot that it is now.

And, no, I don't think sessions are the future.

[Gandalf]

+1 to all that, but please don't remove sessions. I live and die with those.

I actually really like Bridge for key wording and metadata, as well as a first look at images. It is pretty easy to pass images back for forth between Bridge and C1 since they are both browsers. If I am shooting tethered, I go direct into C1, but if I'm shooting to cards I start by setting up a tethered C1 session with my naming convention (YYYYMMDD_client_project for paid work or YYYYMMDD_location for personal/stock/fine art). I copy the cards to my hard drive, rename the DCIM folders and move them into the session folder. In Bridge, I rename the files (same as the folder name with a three or four digit number), review and keyword the images and move them to the C1 session Capture folder (or multiple capture folders depending on the shoot). When I shoot stitches I will put my hand in front of the lens and the beginning and end of the series so I know where a series starts/stops and I can be sure to keep those images together. From there, everything goes back into C1 where images are processed as 300 ppi, 16 bit pro photo tiffs as saved to the session Output folder. Back in Bridge, I will open the Output folder, modify the images as necessary in Photoshop, and save the working files back to Output and the final flattened files to the session Selects folder. At this point the entire session folder is copied to backup and archive drives and deleted from my edit drive. This works well for complex images, but is way overkill for personal work.

First of all, if any of you have recommendations to improve efficiency, I'm all ears. Second, this is clearly a workflow that should be perfect for C1 catalogs (sorry, they don't really work that way), or Media Pro (it can work that way, but I don't love the cataloging features). Instead, I import the entire folder into Lightroom, which is messy and kind of a headache.

[ippolitois]

For whatever it's worth, I hated the catalog in LR. It was a mess and I didn't like the restricted nature of it. I prefer to use the Sessions system that CO7 offers. But, CO7 is a RAW converter, and after using them all, I found it to be the best of the bunch. I keep looking and testing all the other RAW converters, but CO7 still comes up on top for skintones and image quality. If you want a highend image catalog that will do almost everything and maybe even flush your toilet, check out Imatch. http://www.photools.com

As for crashing, I only experienced it when I didn't have the proper resources for the computer to run CO7. One of the main issues I had with my system was my video card. CO7 is very hardware intensive. When I switched my video card over to AMD 7950, I had very hard crashes, and I kept blaming CO7. Tech support asked if I had an adequate power supply to run that video card. I said well it works with everything else except CO7 so it must be CO7.
Out of frustration, I upgraded my power supply, and all of a sudden, CO7 was humming, even with the 7950 overclocked and rarely crashes anymore.

I'm a fan of CO7 because I get personal technical support, fantastic image quality, fast image processing, and a flexible interface, but the most important reason I like CO7 is that I DON'T have to use a catalog. It's nice to have, the folder tree, session or if you really want a catalog.

To each his own. (Fortunately CO7 offers that. Try that with LR)

Paul

[The View]

I agree, Gandalf, the naming of C1 Pro has to be brought to the level where it is workable.

I currently don't use C1 Pro for import because of the impractical naming conventions in C1 Pro that don't allow proper naming and there is NO OPTION for renaming files and folders.

I import first to a hard drive, open up the folders with Canon's RAW processor, rename the folders and files, and then import the images to disc.

It's complicated, but at least it works.

[The View]

There's one more bug that hasn't been addressed yet.

Or rather, two bugs concerning deletion of folders.

1. If you delete a folder that has images in it, it will corrupt the catalog. First you have to delete the images, only then you can delete the folder. That's way too weird.

2. After deleting the empty folder, all folders in the section "folders" become jumbled, totally out of order. You have to close down C1 first, then open it again and the folders will be in the correct order again. If not, you have to close down C1 again, and then it will work.

This problem, where the catalog suddenly loses its control over the folders and they become jumbled, could be a strong pointer on why the catalog becomes corrupted so often.

Hope this helps in getting the catalog to work.

[The View]

The newest crash of the notoriously buggy Capture One Pro catalog:

I was processing yesterday's shoot, had already done all the ratings and adjustments.

And when I opened Capture One Pro just now to do the final selections, all the images had disappeared from the folder.

I had to import again, and I have to start rating, adjusting, again, hours of work lost because Capture One is unable to create a catalog that works.

C1 Pro 7 is still not suitable for a professional environment, as it's way too buggy. Have a deadline? C1 Pro might just crash on you and ruin hours of work.

[Ronald Nyein Zaw Tan]

Write to P1 Tech Support and tell them. Sometimes, sharing oddities here gets lost, because you're complaining and sharing frustrations to fellow users. We (I) could only agree and empathize with you. What you need is to log into your P1 account and let the P1 Tech Support know your system configuration and what is it you're doing to perhaps trying to reproduce it on their testing systems.