Capture One Pro 9 can't handle large catalogs?

bobkeenan · May 9, 2016

Figured I should move my Aperture 3 library to a different program. I like the photo adjust tools that Capture One Pro 9 has. So I got the trial copy. I used the import Aperture feature. But 8 have about 6 years of images in my aperture library including a large microstock folder. Its 324 GB.

It took forever to convert that folder to a catalog. Which was not surprising. But now that I have it as a catalog it takes a long time to go from one photo to another.

Its unusable the way it is. Any suggestions?

Charles Lynn · May 9, 2016

You could use lightroom to handle large catalogs, use Capture One only as a raw converter.

RobBobW · May 9, 2016

bobkeenan said:
Figured I should move my Aperture 3 library to a different program. I like the photo adjust tools that Capture One Pro 9 has. So I got the trial copy. I used the import Aperture feature. But 8 have about 6 years of images in my aperture library including a large microstock folder. Its 324 GB.

It took forever to convert that folder to a catalog. Which was not surprising. But now that I have it as a catalog it takes a long time to go from one photo to another.

Its unusable the way it is. Any suggestions?

Eric Nepean · May 11, 2016

bobkeenan said:
Figured I should move my Aperture 3 library to a different program. I like the photo adjust tools that Capture One Pro 9 has. So I got the trial copy. I used the import Aperture feature. But 8 have about 6 years of images in my aperture library including a large microstock folder. Its 324 GB.

It took forever to convert that folder to a catalog. Which was not surprising. But now that I have it as a catalog it takes a long time to go from one photo to another.

Its unusable the way it is. Any suggestions?

bobkeenan · May 11, 2016

Thanks. I tried it again. trashed all the C1 files. I rebuild the Aperture libraries. I got all my images on. about 35K. I did it in 4 separate Aperture library imports. I then looked at the "all photos" so it would create previews for alll the images. It crashed about halfway through. BTW I have rhe fastest imac with 32 GB of RAM. I did not get an all SSD. I got the hybrid where a smaller SSD buffers into a HD.

I also tried LR using the built in plugin but it created this ultra massive list of folders all by date.

Aperture is such a great program.

So I am at a loss here. But I do not give up easily.

PSGimages · May 12, 2016

RobBobW said:
Hi Bob,

Welcome to Capture One. You will find it to be an amazingly powerful package.

First, I think you were very brave to import your entire Aperture Library at once right of the bat. That said, Capture One is capable of handling collections larger than yours, so size is not the issue. I think what you are seeing is a lag in performance temporarily caused by background generation of previews. Because you imported 324GB of images, this will take quite a while to complete. Once done, you will see things improve considerably.

How much RAM does your computer have? Max it out to optimize your performance.

Have a look at the Free Rocky Nook e-book by Derrick Story for a guide on successful transitioning to Capture One from Aperture. http://www.rockynook.com/making-the-move-to-capture-one-pro/

I have provided some other useful links in this other Forum thread:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/57688583

BAD NEWS GOOD NEWS:

BAD NEWS: I've got about 85k images which are well over a terabyte. I was about to give up on the DAM when CO9 came along as, CO8 was choking to the point I couldn't move. CO9 gave me new life at the time, but I'm now struggling with speed again after adding a lot of images over the winter (yes, all previews are built).

Also, as my catalog grew, I started to find a lag when going from one of the edit tabs to the library/folder tab. This lag didn't exist before and is not horrible but it's getting worse. I'm on an i7 4-core Mac mini (late 2012) and 16GB. My solution will be to break my single giant catalog up into smaller ones. Which I haven't done yet.

Note: My catalogs are on SSD and my referenced image files are on a Thunderbolt spinning disk external drive. I highly recommend putting the catalog on internal or Thunderbolt SSD and using "referenced" file mode.

GOOD NEWS: DAM challenges aside, I'm a fan of CO9 editing, I just love it. The color editing , the styles and presets, the layer approach for selective edits, the RAW conversions. I also love the tethered shooting options (which many won't use but CO's implementation is the best as far as I can tell). I love the customizability of the interface and keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, to work that out, it took me a while to "get it", but now I'm quite nimble in the environment.

Note: I never "converted" any libraries. I just pointed CO at the same referenced library folders and let it import EVERYTHING. Yeah, I lost the Aperture edits, but any TIFFs were fine and if I needed to go back and look at the Aperture version, I could. Forced me to learn the editing functions of CO. That said, I'm lucky because I always added KEYWORDS with Photomechanic before importing images into Aperture. Thus, keywords were embedded in the RAW files and allowed me to import keywords into CO without doing the Aperture database conversion.

Bottomline: PhaseOne has got to improve the DAM. Telling people to buy Mac Pros is not an acceptable answer. My recommendation, if you don't have a 12-core machine, is to break up your catalog into chunks (I plan separate my sports photography into it's own catalog to start as it accounts for probably more than half my images).

Eric Nepean · May 12, 2016

Cogset said:
.........................

That said, I'm lucky because I always added KEYWORDS with Photomechanic before importing images into Aperture. Thus, keywords were embedded in the RAW files and allowed me to import keywords into CO without doing the Aperture database conversion.

I'm thinking of giving photomechnic a try as a DAM tool. How did you like it?

Matt Shelton · May 12, 2016

bobkeenan said:
Thanks. I tried it again. trashed all the C1 files. I rebuild the Aperture libraries. I got all my images on. about 35K. I did it in 4 separate Aperture library imports. I then looked at the "all photos" so it would create previews for alll the images. It crashed about halfway through. BTW I have rhe fastest imac with 32 GB of RAM. I did not get an all SSD. I got the hybrid where a smaller SSD buffers into a HD.

I also tried LR using the built in plugin but it created this ultra massive list of folders all by date.

Aperture is such a great program.

So I am at a loss here. But I do not give up easily.

PSGimages · May 13, 2016

Eric Nepean said:
Cogset said:

.........................

That said, I'm lucky because I always added KEYWORDS with Photomechanic before importing images into Aperture. Thus, keywords were embedded in the RAW files and allowed me to import keywords into CO without doing the Aperture database conversion.

Click to expand...

I'm thinking of giving photomechnic a try as a DAM tool. How did you like it?

I'm not an expert on photomechanic as I use it in a limited way, but it is very fast and it is very good at populating metadata. CameraBits has been hinting at a true "Catalog" add-on or addition to Photomechanic for years, to the point that it's become kind of a joke. With that add-on though it would be more of a true asset manager.... I just don't know if they will ever release it.

I would call current PM a browser with search capabilities and a decent slide show tool. You won't be setting up albums in it, for instance and you can't create virtual copies of raw photos (like you can in LR, CO and Aperture). And it's not particularly good at allowing you to search for , say, all the photos with the keyword "sunset" across 500 folders. It does use the Mac's spotlight search but that can be sluggish. That's not to say it won't work for you, but I got used to a lot of DAM features in Aperture and I would miss those if I only used Photomechanic. Capture One, DAM feature-wise, is no Aperture, but it's good enough for me (except for the slow down in speed as my catalog has grown).

8 or 9 years ago I used to use Nikon Capture NX2 with Photomechanic exclusively. It worked well because NX2 embedded a full JPG preview in the NEF file and I could browse and see the edited NEF images even though they were never processed to JPG or TIFF.

Photomechanic is a deep product and there are features added I've never tried. I would suggest you download it for the 30day free trial. If you want to shoot raw images and convert to JPG/TIFF en masse and then edit in PS or Affinity or something like that, it might be a solution as you can call up the editor right from photomechanic (e.g right-click, edit in Photoshop). That approach uses a lot more disk space (storing the RAW and the TIFF let's say) and is not simple overall, but it does avoid the problems of converting from one DAM to another (as Aperture users are finding out).

danieljcox · May 16, 2016

bobkeenan said:
Thanks. I tried it again. trashed all the C1 files. I rebuild the Aperture libraries. I got all my images on. about 35K. I did it in 4 separate Aperture library imports. I then looked at the "all photos" so it would create previews for alll the images. It crashed about halfway through. BTW I have rhe fastest imac with 32 GB of RAM. I did not get an all SSD. I got the hybrid where a smaller SSD buffers into a HD.

I also tried LR using the built in plugin but it created this ultra massive list of folders all by date.

Aperture is such a great program.

So I am at a loss here. But I do not give up easily.

Search

Capture One Pro 9 can't handle large catalogs?

bobkeenan

Leading Member

Charles Lynn

Member

RobBobW

Senior Member

Eric Nepean

Veteran Member

bobkeenan

Leading Member

PSGimages

Senior Member

Eric Nepean

Veteran Member

Matt Shelton

Forum Enthusiast

PSGimages

Senior Member

danieljcox

Senior Member

Similar threads

Keyboard shortcuts