HuguesInParis
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Hi
Like many people on the Mac, I'm coming from Aperture to Capture One, trying to mimic what was a working workflow in Aperture, and I would like to share ideas.
The subject is known to be complex, because there are different needs, different solutions, different configurations and the software itself is complex.
It is my opinion that Capture One is one of the best raw editor on the market but has a cataloging functionality which can be considered subpar for a lot of usages. More precisely it was developed historically for professional photographers who work in studio on a series of independent projects, hence the session mode, and the cataloging part has been plugged on it in a more or less satisfactory way.
I will speak here from the point of view of an amateur photograph, who has put some money on Capture One, and wants to keep on trying to use it because of development quality, but is still struggling to find the best way to use it as a cataloger.
I have around 25 000 photos covering roughly 20 years, with 500 small videos. And I plan to continue on adding 3-5000 new each year, mixing personal photos and leisure shootings. That puts me in the 500 GB of storage need
While I know Aperture very well and have been using it for 12 or 13 years, I'm still not completely at ease with C1, so pardon me if I make some mistake.
This will cover the following topics :
- Storage
- Backup
- Culling
- Organizing and Tagging
- Sharing
It will not cover the topic of migration, which is a subject in itself, with sometimes different solutions from the ones addressing current workflow.
One of the difficulty of Aperture demise (*) is that Aperture was so easy to use that you could play with it just for the sake of perfectly organizing your Library, without really asking yourself what was the purpose of organizing it perfectly. Now a lot of tricky questions appear, which are difficult to answer. At least for an amateur photograph. And indeed, some of usual workflow modalities are a way to implicitly answer them, without really addressing them as such.
Indeed, in the beginning, with Aperture, everything was easy. With a bit of tweaking you could have all your photos, coming from your DSLR and your smartphone in your Mac and mirrored on your devices so you could access everything from everywhere at any time. Not so, today, and choices must be made.
Sofar, I'm inclined to do the following :
a) Starting from Access (and sharing) need
I want to be able to access my photos from everywhere at any time. Since I'm all Apple (Mac, iPhones and iPads), the easiest way is to use Apple Photos, which handles the synchronization on all Apple devices .
It comes with a map view which I find quite useful to retrieve a particular photo and to keep track of where a photo was precisely shot.
The Face view, while not 100 % efficient, is a cool bonus to find my kids and friends pictures.
Apple now offers an automatic recognition of scene (for example : all "sea" pictures), and it is likely the way of the future, that will prevent from tedious tagging
The trick is that Apple charges you an hefty price for access to the cloud : 10€ per month above 200 GB.
That's too much for me. I feel robbed, for the occasional use I will have of it, and don't want Apple to indulge in such extorsions plans.
So I settled for the 1€/ month for up to 50 GB which I could reach by some size and jpeg optimization. I may eventually end in the 3 € / month for the 50-200 GB plan.
Here all my iPhone pictures are present by default, and back-upped by essence by iCloud. (as far as I don't erase them myself from there).
I used to backup my iPhones pictures in Aperture, since I used Aperture to navigate through my pictures, but it was a PITA to do (mainly because how they wanted to come back as duplicates in the cloud afterwards) and I don't see the benefits of doing this in Capture One.
I don't like Photos automatic organisation, so I replicated my Aperture organisations in Photos albums, which is mainly a high level thematic folder grouping (Shootings, Moments, Holidays, Family, Friends, Pro, Convenient) with inside each maybe around one undred thematic projects of 5 to 200 pictures each.
Here I take care every photo is localized and has its album. Every photo prior to aperture migration has keyword, and rating (** to *****). So far, none has after the migration.
Now I need to come up with a way to upload my pics from C1, which will mainly contains my DSLR photos.
There are some C1 exporting recipes for that. Which brings us to the next topic
b) Culling and rationale for C1 use
Culling iPhones photos is not really a subject : they are often only there for memories, not very heavy or particularly duplicated, nor particularly high quality or sophisticated . I keep almost everything.
By nature on my DSLR, I will typically make several shots of the same subject, each bringing an additional 20MB Raw + 5MB Jpeg.
If I put everything on Apple Photos, I will rapidly go back to the 10€/month plan, and I will clutter my Photos Catalog with duplicates, making it useless.
That's where C1 comes in. As a culling tool, but also as an editing tool, as often I need to enhance the picture before uploading it to the permanent Apple Photos archive.
This is also why it makes sense to have a software which does both, developing and cataloging, as you can sometimes change which picture is a keeper based on your editing work and success.
Also C1 can handle as big as I need photos collections, possibly slicing them for performance issues, but without any size limitations as in Apple Photos Plans.
This is the rationale for splitting the organization and storage : Apple Photos is the source for iPhone pictures, but C1 is the source for High quality DSLR photos.
c) Folder organization and storage
Due to legacy, my Aperture photos have been referenced on a folder hierarchy in the file system that mirrors the project organisation inside Aperture (see above).
I intend to keep the same organisation for future pictures that will go in the C1 catalog.
That way I stay coherent with my Photos organization. Also, if for any reason I need to access to the photos through the finder, it remains transparent.
As a consequence, I need to think it over at import stage in C1.
So every import needs to identify what are the different thematics involved (better if it is done after each unique thematic shooting), define a name for these thematics, group photos in different folders accordingly, and then replicate this is in C1 User collection, by creating a project for each thematic.
And also an album in each project with all images inside. Then move each folder to each album.
Pretty cumbersome. And better done from the C1 User interface.
I tend to put each new import in a big folder then manually separate the photos in the different folders needed, that I create on the fly for that purpose.
There may be room for improvement here using C1 templates, but not sure yet how.
So far my pictures are on a SSD storage that makes the all process smoother, but I may have to deal with separate hard drives in the future
d) Backup
The backup is transparent as the DSLR photos are on my main hard drive and the back-up is done by Time Machine.
Due to historical reasons, I bought also a SSD for the back-up hard drive. That way I have the benefit of silence and speed, and no constant spinning and lagging. It might be overkill, but so far, it works.
There is a caveat for the iPhone photos : Apple Photos only keep deleted files for 30 days, so if I make a mistake without noticing it I don't have a backup inside Apple Photos. You can get around this by asking Apple Photos to store locally your iCloud photos and include them in your Time Machine scope (where they are by default if it 's on your main hard drive)
On top of that, given that the Time Machine disk will ultimately get full and begin erasing the older backups, it is good practice to have an additional hard drive where you once a year backup all your photos.
e) Back to culling
I found I needed a way to retrieve the Aperture stacking feature which is absent from C1.
In my idea, a stack is a group of photos taken a few seconds apart, that are the same in terms of subject and view angle; basically they are redundant.
On top of that, I add the principle of choosing as head of stack the "best" photo of the stack
The benefit of stacking I see is as follows :
- You get a reminder of the process and mistakes that led you to take different pictures and it is an opportunity to become a better photographer.
- It obliges you to think of what is the best picture. You become aware that there is no one single answer to this question; this leads you to think of what you want to do and say with your picture
- you get a (subjective) feeling of accomplishment by mastering your shooting session
- in a way you're advancing yourself for the "sharing" step, so the time is not lost
- It makes it a lot easier to look at a shooting from a reportage "point of view" by selecting only the "head o f stack"
- you can save disk storage and time in organization and tagging, dealing with only one picture instead of a few
What I contemplate to do then is :
- keep shooting in Raw +Jpeg.
- filter out jpg (ctrl J as personalized shortcut)
- go rapidly through the ones that are flops and tag them red (7 as a personalized shortcut). Possibly delete them later if it is worth the hassle
- for every stack I see flag the head of stack yellow (8 as a personalized shortcut; 6 as "no label" to undo). You can flag two instead of one if you hesitate
- then select every yellow in the album (ctrl 8 as a personalized shortcut)
- rate them (1 to 5 as a shortcut). From a website I visited years ago :
• One-star: Keep• These images aren’t very good, but aren’t accidental photos of my shoes, so they stick around, but are usually excluded from normal viewing.• Two-stars: Show• These are for decent photos that I either have no inclination to share, or it would be redundant to share.• Three-stars: Share• These are for good photos that I want to share.• Four-stars: Boast• These are the ones (along with the fives) that I’d show people as representative.• Five-stars: Call National Geographic
Actually, when I do that I tend to also edit and crop some pictures in order to upgrade them. (the original jpg might be helpful as a reference on how to render some colors)
There's a trade-off here : the more pictures you edit, the more they will be correctly classed, and relevantly shared afterwards, but the more time it takes, and the longer you'll delay the process of sharing them.
I see it optimized as being able to push your pictures in the days after they have been taken, so that you can effectively bring them in discussion. Eventually coming back to a few of them if you want the perfect edit
f) Share
I still am in the process to thinking this over.
When I did the Aperture migration to Photos, I had 20 000 pics to migrate and needed to bring the space ratio in a factor 10 so I was quite drastic :
- discard the *
- separate all raw from raw +jpeg pairs and keep the jpg
- compress quality 20% the **
- compress quality 70% the ***
- compress quality 80% the ****
- compress the files > 5 MB
- keep the other *****
It worked, it saved me a hundred bucks avoiding the 200 GB plan for a few years but I took me a lot of work and I am now wondering if It was not too drastic, as it messes with Apple Photos Face recognition feature for some pics where the face is small.
Now that I'm approaching the point where I need to go 200GB, I'm considering a simpler process where I'l take all my yellows C1 and upgrade them orange selectively on the ** and maybe compress all 80% while scaling the resolution and using a sRGB profile.
Then export all orange to Apple Photos and place them in their appropriate mirrored albums created for the purpose
g) Tagging
Now that Apple Photo would be my software of choice to look at my pictures, I will
- ensure all photos are in a dedicated thematic album (with a smart album chasing the ones that are not)
-> replicating the folder structure on my hard drive
- ensure all photos are properly geolocalized (with a smart album chasing the ones that are not)
-> this seems easier and safer than using an external software embedding gps data in the Raw before exporting from C1
- give-up keyword tagging, except maybe for some 5* with my kids, in order to make sure Apple Face recognition does not miss them
- finding a way for rating propagation from C1 to Photos, either through a dedicated apples script or maybe a simpler two-step process, exporting first all 4* & 5* and tagging them favorites
Conclusion
The process is a lot more complex than before and I lost one-place storage of all my pics, and coherent tagging, rating, and geolocalization.
So it's not ideal.
Anyway I keep trace of all originals (iPhone on Photos iCloud, DSLR in hard-drive and C1), have a backup, have a coherent album structure on Photos, and can access my best "stacked" pics from everywhere.
So what do you think ?
What is your process, Capture One Mac users ?
HuguesInParis
(*) Aperture can still work on Big Sur once patched by an app called Revolut, but
a) it seems to provoke big troubles with the Finder who can be stucked at 100% CPU
b) there is no guarantee it is bug free
c) there is no guarantee it it will continue so in the future
d) it used to interfere with Time Machine provoking huge backups each time it is open
e) the developer part shows its age
f) connection with iCloud is not possible any more, which makes sharing complex
Like many people on the Mac, I'm coming from Aperture to Capture One, trying to mimic what was a working workflow in Aperture, and I would like to share ideas.
The subject is known to be complex, because there are different needs, different solutions, different configurations and the software itself is complex.
It is my opinion that Capture One is one of the best raw editor on the market but has a cataloging functionality which can be considered subpar for a lot of usages. More precisely it was developed historically for professional photographers who work in studio on a series of independent projects, hence the session mode, and the cataloging part has been plugged on it in a more or less satisfactory way.
I will speak here from the point of view of an amateur photograph, who has put some money on Capture One, and wants to keep on trying to use it because of development quality, but is still struggling to find the best way to use it as a cataloger.
I have around 25 000 photos covering roughly 20 years, with 500 small videos. And I plan to continue on adding 3-5000 new each year, mixing personal photos and leisure shootings. That puts me in the 500 GB of storage need
While I know Aperture very well and have been using it for 12 or 13 years, I'm still not completely at ease with C1, so pardon me if I make some mistake.
This will cover the following topics :
- Storage
- Backup
- Culling
- Organizing and Tagging
- Sharing
It will not cover the topic of migration, which is a subject in itself, with sometimes different solutions from the ones addressing current workflow.
One of the difficulty of Aperture demise (*) is that Aperture was so easy to use that you could play with it just for the sake of perfectly organizing your Library, without really asking yourself what was the purpose of organizing it perfectly. Now a lot of tricky questions appear, which are difficult to answer. At least for an amateur photograph. And indeed, some of usual workflow modalities are a way to implicitly answer them, without really addressing them as such.
Indeed, in the beginning, with Aperture, everything was easy. With a bit of tweaking you could have all your photos, coming from your DSLR and your smartphone in your Mac and mirrored on your devices so you could access everything from everywhere at any time. Not so, today, and choices must be made.
Sofar, I'm inclined to do the following :
a) Starting from Access (and sharing) need
I want to be able to access my photos from everywhere at any time. Since I'm all Apple (Mac, iPhones and iPads), the easiest way is to use Apple Photos, which handles the synchronization on all Apple devices .
It comes with a map view which I find quite useful to retrieve a particular photo and to keep track of where a photo was precisely shot.
The Face view, while not 100 % efficient, is a cool bonus to find my kids and friends pictures.
Apple now offers an automatic recognition of scene (for example : all "sea" pictures), and it is likely the way of the future, that will prevent from tedious tagging
The trick is that Apple charges you an hefty price for access to the cloud : 10€ per month above 200 GB.
That's too much for me. I feel robbed, for the occasional use I will have of it, and don't want Apple to indulge in such extorsions plans.
So I settled for the 1€/ month for up to 50 GB which I could reach by some size and jpeg optimization. I may eventually end in the 3 € / month for the 50-200 GB plan.
Here all my iPhone pictures are present by default, and back-upped by essence by iCloud. (as far as I don't erase them myself from there).
I used to backup my iPhones pictures in Aperture, since I used Aperture to navigate through my pictures, but it was a PITA to do (mainly because how they wanted to come back as duplicates in the cloud afterwards) and I don't see the benefits of doing this in Capture One.
I don't like Photos automatic organisation, so I replicated my Aperture organisations in Photos albums, which is mainly a high level thematic folder grouping (Shootings, Moments, Holidays, Family, Friends, Pro, Convenient) with inside each maybe around one undred thematic projects of 5 to 200 pictures each.
Here I take care every photo is localized and has its album. Every photo prior to aperture migration has keyword, and rating (** to *****). So far, none has after the migration.
Now I need to come up with a way to upload my pics from C1, which will mainly contains my DSLR photos.
There are some C1 exporting recipes for that. Which brings us to the next topic
b) Culling and rationale for C1 use
Culling iPhones photos is not really a subject : they are often only there for memories, not very heavy or particularly duplicated, nor particularly high quality or sophisticated . I keep almost everything.
By nature on my DSLR, I will typically make several shots of the same subject, each bringing an additional 20MB Raw + 5MB Jpeg.
If I put everything on Apple Photos, I will rapidly go back to the 10€/month plan, and I will clutter my Photos Catalog with duplicates, making it useless.
That's where C1 comes in. As a culling tool, but also as an editing tool, as often I need to enhance the picture before uploading it to the permanent Apple Photos archive.
This is also why it makes sense to have a software which does both, developing and cataloging, as you can sometimes change which picture is a keeper based on your editing work and success.
Also C1 can handle as big as I need photos collections, possibly slicing them for performance issues, but without any size limitations as in Apple Photos Plans.
This is the rationale for splitting the organization and storage : Apple Photos is the source for iPhone pictures, but C1 is the source for High quality DSLR photos.
c) Folder organization and storage
Due to legacy, my Aperture photos have been referenced on a folder hierarchy in the file system that mirrors the project organisation inside Aperture (see above).
I intend to keep the same organisation for future pictures that will go in the C1 catalog.
That way I stay coherent with my Photos organization. Also, if for any reason I need to access to the photos through the finder, it remains transparent.
As a consequence, I need to think it over at import stage in C1.
So every import needs to identify what are the different thematics involved (better if it is done after each unique thematic shooting), define a name for these thematics, group photos in different folders accordingly, and then replicate this is in C1 User collection, by creating a project for each thematic.
And also an album in each project with all images inside. Then move each folder to each album.
Pretty cumbersome. And better done from the C1 User interface.
I tend to put each new import in a big folder then manually separate the photos in the different folders needed, that I create on the fly for that purpose.
There may be room for improvement here using C1 templates, but not sure yet how.
So far my pictures are on a SSD storage that makes the all process smoother, but I may have to deal with separate hard drives in the future
d) Backup
The backup is transparent as the DSLR photos are on my main hard drive and the back-up is done by Time Machine.
Due to historical reasons, I bought also a SSD for the back-up hard drive. That way I have the benefit of silence and speed, and no constant spinning and lagging. It might be overkill, but so far, it works.
There is a caveat for the iPhone photos : Apple Photos only keep deleted files for 30 days, so if I make a mistake without noticing it I don't have a backup inside Apple Photos. You can get around this by asking Apple Photos to store locally your iCloud photos and include them in your Time Machine scope (where they are by default if it 's on your main hard drive)
On top of that, given that the Time Machine disk will ultimately get full and begin erasing the older backups, it is good practice to have an additional hard drive where you once a year backup all your photos.
e) Back to culling
I found I needed a way to retrieve the Aperture stacking feature which is absent from C1.
In my idea, a stack is a group of photos taken a few seconds apart, that are the same in terms of subject and view angle; basically they are redundant.
On top of that, I add the principle of choosing as head of stack the "best" photo of the stack
The benefit of stacking I see is as follows :
- You get a reminder of the process and mistakes that led you to take different pictures and it is an opportunity to become a better photographer.
- It obliges you to think of what is the best picture. You become aware that there is no one single answer to this question; this leads you to think of what you want to do and say with your picture
- you get a (subjective) feeling of accomplishment by mastering your shooting session
- in a way you're advancing yourself for the "sharing" step, so the time is not lost
- It makes it a lot easier to look at a shooting from a reportage "point of view" by selecting only the "head o f stack"
- you can save disk storage and time in organization and tagging, dealing with only one picture instead of a few
What I contemplate to do then is :
- keep shooting in Raw +Jpeg.
- I don't like the idea of not being 100% sure to visualize my photo now or in the future, either due to apple not upgrading its OS, or C1 providing a bad retro-engineered icc profile (which he does on Canon)
- filter out jpg (ctrl J as personalized shortcut)
- go rapidly through the ones that are flops and tag them red (7 as a personalized shortcut). Possibly delete them later if it is worth the hassle
- for every stack I see flag the head of stack yellow (8 as a personalized shortcut; 6 as "no label" to undo). You can flag two instead of one if you hesitate
- then select every yellow in the album (ctrl 8 as a personalized shortcut)
- rate them (1 to 5 as a shortcut). From a website I visited years ago :
• One-star: Keep• These images aren’t very good, but aren’t accidental photos of my shoes, so they stick around, but are usually excluded from normal viewing.• Two-stars: Show• These are for decent photos that I either have no inclination to share, or it would be redundant to share.• Three-stars: Share• These are for good photos that I want to share.• Four-stars: Boast• These are the ones (along with the fives) that I’d show people as representative.• Five-stars: Call National Geographic
Actually, when I do that I tend to also edit and crop some pictures in order to upgrade them. (the original jpg might be helpful as a reference on how to render some colors)
There's a trade-off here : the more pictures you edit, the more they will be correctly classed, and relevantly shared afterwards, but the more time it takes, and the longer you'll delay the process of sharing them.
I see it optimized as being able to push your pictures in the days after they have been taken, so that you can effectively bring them in discussion. Eventually coming back to a few of them if you want the perfect edit
f) Share
I still am in the process to thinking this over.
When I did the Aperture migration to Photos, I had 20 000 pics to migrate and needed to bring the space ratio in a factor 10 so I was quite drastic :
- discard the *
- separate all raw from raw +jpeg pairs and keep the jpg
- compress quality 20% the **
- compress quality 70% the ***
- compress quality 80% the ****
- compress the files > 5 MB
- keep the other *****
It worked, it saved me a hundred bucks avoiding the 200 GB plan for a few years but I took me a lot of work and I am now wondering if It was not too drastic, as it messes with Apple Photos Face recognition feature for some pics where the face is small.
Now that I'm approaching the point where I need to go 200GB, I'm considering a simpler process where I'l take all my yellows C1 and upgrade them orange selectively on the ** and maybe compress all 80% while scaling the resolution and using a sRGB profile.
Then export all orange to Apple Photos and place them in their appropriate mirrored albums created for the purpose
g) Tagging
Now that Apple Photo would be my software of choice to look at my pictures, I will
- ensure all photos are in a dedicated thematic album (with a smart album chasing the ones that are not)
-> replicating the folder structure on my hard drive
- ensure all photos are properly geolocalized (with a smart album chasing the ones that are not)
-> this seems easier and safer than using an external software embedding gps data in the Raw before exporting from C1
- give-up keyword tagging, except maybe for some 5* with my kids, in order to make sure Apple Face recognition does not miss them
- finding a way for rating propagation from C1 to Photos, either through a dedicated apples script or maybe a simpler two-step process, exporting first all 4* & 5* and tagging them favorites
Conclusion
The process is a lot more complex than before and I lost one-place storage of all my pics, and coherent tagging, rating, and geolocalization.
So it's not ideal.
Anyway I keep trace of all originals (iPhone on Photos iCloud, DSLR in hard-drive and C1), have a backup, have a coherent album structure on Photos, and can access my best "stacked" pics from everywhere.
So what do you think ?
What is your process, Capture One Mac users ?
HuguesInParis
(*) Aperture can still work on Big Sur once patched by an app called Revolut, but
a) it seems to provoke big troubles with the Finder who can be stucked at 100% CPU
b) there is no guarantee it is bug free
c) there is no guarantee it it will continue so in the future
d) it used to interfere with Time Machine provoking huge backups each time it is open
e) the developer part shows its age
f) connection with iCloud is not possible any more, which makes sharing complex
